Pollution over Megacity Regions from the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES)

Abstract:

The world’s megacities, defined as urban areas with over 10 million people, are growing rapidly in population and increasing in number, as the migration from rural to urban areas continues. This rapid growth brings economic opportunities but also exacts costs, such as traffic congestion, inadequate sanitation and poor air quality. Monitoring air quality has become a priority for many regional governments, as they seek to understand the sources and distribution of the species contributing to the local pollution. Hyperspectral infrared instruments orbiting the Earth can measure many of these species simultaneously, and since they measure averages over their footprints, they are less sensitive to proximity to strong point sources than in situ measurements, and thus provide a more regional perspective.

The JPL TES team has selected a number of megacities as Special Observation targets. These observations, or transects, are sets of 20 closely spaced (12 km apart) TES observations carried out every sixteen days. We will present the TES ozone (O3), peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN), ammonia (NH₃), formic acid (HCOOH) and methanol (CH₃OH) data collected over Mexico City, Lagos (Nigeria) and Los Angeles from 2013 through 2015, and illustrate how the seasonality in the TES measurements is related to local emissions, biomass burning and regional circulation patterns, and we will reinforce our arguments with MODIS AOD and TES CO data. One of the transects over Mexico City in October demonstrates very nicely the synergy obtained from simultaneous measurements of multiple trace species. We will also discuss the spatial variability along the transects and how it is related to topography and land use.