LACCE: Landslide Climate Change Experiment
Science: LACCE will use high-resolution, targeted, airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, field instruments, and models to quantify the number, size, motion, and groundwater hydrology of active landslides, and measure their sensitivity to changes in precipitation due to ongoing climate change.
HAMAQ: Hemispheric Airborne Measurements of Air Quality
Science: Hemispheric Airborne Measurements of Air Quality (HAMAQ) is funded under NASA’s Earth Venture Suborbital (EVS-4) program. Current plans include two deployments in 2028, including the Mexico City megalopolis and another North American site yet to be selected. The effort will include two aircraft, NASA’s B777 for in situ sampling and G-III for remote sensing. These aircraft will be used to complete the integrated observing system, combining satellite observations, ground-based monitoring, research observations, and air quality modeling.
Website: https://science.larc.nasa.gov/HAMAQ/
White Paper: HAMAQ White Paper.
ROSES: Anticipate solicitation release in Q1CY2026
FarmFlux
FarmFlux: While the burning of fossil fuels remains the leading source of carbon in our atmosphere, farmlands and ranchlands are also substantial sources of gas and particle emissions. In the FarmFlux mission, led by Glenn Wolfe of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, researchers will measure the amount of greenhouse gases, nitrogen, and other pollutants that are emitted from agricultural lands across the United States.
EVS-4: FarmFlux, FORTE, HAMAQ, INSPYRES, LACCE, Snow4Flow
FarmFlux: While the burning of fossil fuels remains the leading source of carbon in our atmosphere, farmlands and ranchlands are also substantial sources of gas and particle emissions. In the FarmFlux mission, led by Glenn Wolfe of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, researchers will measure the amount of greenhouse gases, nitrogen, and other pollutants that are emitted from agricultural lands across the United States.
The Arctic Coastlines – Frontlines of Rapidly Transforming Ecosystems (FORTE) project will observe how ecosystems – rivers, deltas, lagoons, and estuaries – respond to changing climate on the North Slope of Alaska.
FORTE addresses a pressing and unresolved Earth System science question: How do nearshore Arctic ecosystems, from lower watersheds to coastlines and adjacent seas, respond to changes in the mobilization, magnitude, composition, and seasonality in land-ocean fluxes (freshwater, heat, carbon, sediment and nutrients) and what are the implications for climate change feedbacks and amplification?
Websites: https://espo.nasa.gov/forte
https://cce.nasa.gov/forte/index.html
ROSES: FORTE Science Team ROSES call
White Paper: FORTE White Paper
Hemispheric Airborne Measurements of Air Quality (HAMAQ) is funded under NASA’s Earth Venture Suborbital (EVS-4) program. Current plans include two deployments in 2028, including the Mexico City megalopolis and another North American site yet to be selected. The effort will include two aircraft, NASA’s B777 for in situ sampling and G-III for remote sensing. These aircraft will be used to complete the integrated observing system, combining satellite observations, ground-based monitoring, research observations, and air quality modeling.
Website: https://science.larc.nasa.gov/HAMAQ/
White Paper: HAMAQ White Paper.
ROSES: Anticipate solicitation release in Q1CY2026
The INjected Smoke and PYRocumulonimbus Experiment (INSPYRE) Science Team will constrain the role of pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) in the warming climate system and characterize their physical links to extreme wildfire behavior.
Website: https://espo.nasa.gov/inspyre
White Paper: INSPYRE White Paper
ROSES: INSPYRE Science Team ROSES call
LACCE will use high-resolution, targeted, airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, field instruments, and models to quantify the number, size, motion, and groundwater hydrology of active landslides, and measure their sensitivity to changes in precipitation due to ongoing climate change.
Snow4Flow: Quantifying the ongoing retreat of glaciers and ice sheets – and projecting their futures – are major societal concerns due to their contribution to sea-level rise and influence on water resources, natural hazards, and associated socioeconomic impacts.
Website: https://snow4flow.lpl.arizona.edu
White Paper: Snow4Flow White Paper
ROSES: Anticipate solicitation release in Q1CY2025
EVS-4 INSPYRE: INjected Smoke and PYRocumulonimbus Experiment
Science: The INjected Smoke and PYRocumulonimbus Experiment (INSPYRE) Science Team will constrain the role of pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) in the warming climate system and characterize their physical links to extreme wildfire behavior.
Website: https://espo.nasa.gov/inspyre
White Paper: INSPYRE White Paper
ROSES: INSPYRE Science Team ROSES call
Snow4Flow
Science: Snow4Flow: Quantifying the ongoing retreat of glaciers and ice sheets – and projecting their futures – are major societal concerns due to their contribution to sea-level rise and influence on water resources, natural hazards, and associated socioeconomic impacts.
Website: https://snow4flow.lpl.arizona.edu
White Paper: Snow4Flow White Paper
ROSES: Anticipate solicitation release in Q1CY2025
FORTE: Arctic Coastlines – Frontlines of Rapidly Transforming Ecosystems
Science: Investigate how nearshore Arctic ecosystems–from lower watersheds to coastlines and adjacent seas – respond to changes in the mobilization, magnitude, composition, and seasonality in land-ocean fluxes and what are the implications for climate change feedbacks and amplification.
Websites: https://espo.nasa.gov/forte
https://cce.nasa.gov/forte/index.html
ROSES: FORTE Science Team ROSES call
White Paper: FORTE White Paper
Polarized Submillimeter Ice-cloud Imager (PolSIR)
https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/climate/instruments/polsir
The PolSIR instrument – short for Polarized Submillimeter Ice-cloud Radiometer – will help humanity better understand Earth’s dynamic atmosphere and its impact on climate by studying ice clouds that form at high altitudes throughout tropical and sub-tropical regions.
The representation of ice clouds in Global Climate Models (GCMs) remains a major source of uncertainty in climate predictions. Ice clouds have been identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as one of the biggest unknown in our understanding of the climate system and how it changes.
The goal of PolSIR is to better characterize and understand diurnal variability of tropical and sub-tropical ice clouds on our climate, to provide key observational constraints on ice properties in climate models, and to enable modelers to develop more accurate cloud parameterizations.
PolSIR consists of two, 12U CubeSats equipped with a cross-track scanning polarized submillimeter radiometer in the spectral range of 325–680 GHz; fly in separate, 52-degree inclination, non-sun-synchronous orbits, taking science measurements between ±35 degrees latitude enabling monthly sampling of the diurnal cycle of ice clouds and their microphysical properties.
Two years of concurrent observations, enabling comparison of daily, seasonal, and annual cycles.
The INCUS mission provides the first tropics-wide investigation of the evolution of the vertical transport of air and water by convective storms, one of the most influential, yet unmeasured atmospheric processes. Such measurements are central to improving our capability to better predict extreme weather events and their changes with warming climates.
https://activate.larc.nasa.gov/
Riding the marine layer skies looking for aerosol particles – to predict future climate change.
Simulate climate and predict change as it happens!
NASA’s ACTIVATE mission is on the hunt for clouds off the coast over the western Atlantic Ocean! It is looking for answers to help us understand how clouds and aerosols (particles in the air) affect light and heat from the sun. The size and number of cloud droplets within a cloud determines things like how long the cloud lasts, how well it traps heat at the earth’s surface, or how well it reflects sunlight. All of these can have a significant impact on the earth’s climate. One of the largest unknowns in climate change is how the interaction between clouds and aerosols impacts the climate and understanding this is critical towards improving predictions of how future climate will be impacted by human emissions.
“Climate change is one of the most pressing issues we are facing on this planet; it is important for all regions of the world. I have spent my research career studying aerosol particles and the extension to how these particles interact with clouds has opened up a whole new avenue of greater challenges that entices me. The research involves using airborne platforms, which has always been of interest to me as I have always been drawn to airplanes.” – Armin Sorooshian, Principal Investigator
NASA’s ACTIVATE investigation is a five-year project studying how clouds and aerosols interact. Aerosols are very tiny particles that are suspended in the atmosphere and are often the “seed that cloud droplets form around. ACTIVATE focuses on marine boundary layer (MBL) clouds off of the east coast of North America. This region sees a large source of aerosols transported from the US eastern seaboard, making it an ideal area to study these interactions. ACTIVATE is aiming to collect a dataset on aerosol and cloud interactions of unprecedented size and statistics. What’s unique about this investigation? NASA Langley’s King Air and the HU-25A Falcon aircraft are flying together in coordinated patterns to simultaneously gather data from well above the clouds and from directly within the vicinity of the cloud deck itself. These data for both aerosols and clouds will give scientists better understanding as to how these mediums interact and affect our climate.
https://activate.larc.nasa.gov/media/#videos
https://activate.larc.nasa.gov/files/2020/07/ACTIVATE_DropSonde_20191216_141420_v2.mp4
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/activate-makes-a-careful-return-to-flight
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/probing-the-hazy-mysteries-of-marine-clouds
