Measurements of Air Quality from Space, the TEMPO instrument

The World Health Organization has estimated around 4.2 million premature deaths in the world in 2016 due to air pollution. Tackling this problem requires precise measurements of the Earth’s atmosphere composition. In this presentation, I will describe the efforts that our group at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics leads to monitor key atmospheric pollutants from space. The focus will be on the information we can extract from ultraviolet and visible backscattered sunlight observations. I will also address our work to create long-term data records of formaldehyde, glyoxal, and water vapor and the TEMPO (http://tempo.si.edu/index.html) instrument. Throughout the presentation, I will connect our expertise observing the Earth with observations of exoplanet atmospheres.