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 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.
Aquarius/SAC-D mapped the salinity (the concentration of dissolved salt) at the ocean surface, information critical to improving our understanding of two major components of Earth’s climate system: the water cycle and ocean circulation. By measuring ocean salinity from space, Aquarius provided new insights into how the massive natural exchange of freshwater between the ocean, atmosphere and sea ice influences ocean circulation, weather and climate.
https://act-america.larc.nasa.gov/
https://blogs.nasa.gov/earthexpeditions/tag/act-america/
Flying with the gases that impact the climate around you. Making the invisible journey visible.
Track carbon footprints across the sky and through four seasons!
ACT-America is on the hunt for greenhouse gases from our ground and in our air. The project measured both natural and human-based methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) to identify how these gases are created, where they go and what absorbs them. Understanding the carbon cycle is powerful knowledge. It means we can predict future climate impacts, develop smarter mitigation strategies, and create fact-based policy. Imagine the benefit from “seeing” where these invisible gases are coming from and where they go.
“ACT-America measurements fill a critical gap in our understanding of the sources, sinks and transport of climate-altering greenhouse gasses. We now see how weather stirs the atmosphere and mixes these gasses across the continent, like a large spoon mixing the cream in your coffee.” – Ken Davis, Principal Investigator
The ACT-America investigation featured five seasonal aircraft campaigns spread over three years, across the eastern and central regions of the United States. Instruments aboard a NASA C-130 and a NASA B-200 aircraft measured greenhouse gasses and indicators of the origins of these greenhouse gases and tracked how weather systems transport them. The aircraft data are part of a growing network of observations that will track the “footprints” of greenhouse gases to enable: 1) policy makers, citizens and industry to understand how their actions are changing the earth’s climate; 2) knowledge of natural gas leaks and awareness of opportunities to minimize these losses; 3) how the earth’s ecosystems contribute to the carbon cycle; and 4) accurate forecasting of future climate. ACT-America’s data can be found here.
