Abstract View
The NASA Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA): Enhancing Societal Impact through Early Community Engagement
ABIGAIL NASTAN, David Diner, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Abstract Number: 579
Working Group: Translating Aerosol Research for Societal Impact: Science Communication and Public Outreach
Abstract
The NASA Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) investigation seeks to extend our current understanding of the impact of the amount and composition of outdoor, airborne fine particulate matter on adverse health outcomes. The MAIA satellite instrument, in development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and currently planned for launch in late 2022, will collect multiangular, multispectral, and polarimetric measurements of scattered sunlight over a set of globally distributed targets. Retrieved aerosol properties will be combined with ground-based air quality monitor data and chemical transport model results to produce 1-km gridded data products of daily-averaged PM10 and PM2.5 mass, and the fractional abundances of sulfate, nitrate, organic carbon, elemental carbon, and dust making up PM2.5 mixtures. Epidemiologists on the MAIA Science Team will use these data to conduct studies on health outcomes in MAIA’s Primary Target Areas. Observations will also be collected over a wider set of Secondary Target Areas. The MAIA team anticipates these data to be of value to epidemiologists, environmental health researchers, air quality agencies, environmental justice advocates, aerosol and climate researchers, and others.
MAIA’s data products will be publicly available from NASA’s Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC), free of charge. With the objective of optimizing the MAIA data for our various user communities, the MAIA project and the NASA Applied Sciences Program partner on a MAIA Early Adopters Program, which invites potential users to give feedback on the planned products and provides resources to users pre-launch to assist them in incorporating the products into their workflows. This presentation will highlight the contributions of the MAIA Early Adopter community, which includes 172 members as of this writing, to improvements in the investigation and data product design. These improvements underscore the importance of establishing an open and collaborative relationship between data providers and data users throughout the lifetime of a project, especially early in development.