NASA satellite data available for health research, policy
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Key takeaways:
- The Earth Action Program collects data from more than 20 satellites.
- Six cities are using data on particulate matter in their climate action plans.
- New satellites will examine surface ozone and ocean color.
SAN DIEGO — As a constellation of satellites orbits the Earth, researchers, health care providers, policymakers and other stakeholders in respiratory health can harness their power, said John Haynes, MS, of NASA’s Earth Action Program.
“Every day, we download over 25 terabytes of data from this constellation,” Haynes, who is program manager of health and air quality applications, said during his presentation at the American Thoracic Society International Conference.
“And the really awesome news is this is all free,” he continued. “All the data from our constellation of satellites are free and open access, available to everyone across the globe through earthdata.nasa.gov.”
The more than 20 satellites in the Earth Action Program continuously monitor weather and climate for research and applications, Haynes said, comprising the largest civilian constellation that the world has ever known.
“Our mission is to enable people and organizations to apply insights from Earth science to benefit the economy, health, quality of life, and the environment,” Haynes said.
“We have hundreds of partners across the globe that we work with to help them assimilate our conservation data from our satellite constellation,” he continued.
By providing these data, these stakeholders can make better decisions and policy, Haynes said. Also, he said, the program is guided by the watchwords of scalability, building bridges and user-centric solutions.
“All of our projects must be hand in hand with a decisionmaker, a stakeholder, a partner who needs or wants to make better decisions based on Earth observations,” he said.
Climate change
As part of the Earth Action Program, the Health & Air Quality Applications Program has been focused on the impact of climate change on human health since 2000.
“Rising temperatures, more extreme weather events, rising sea levels, increasing carbon dioxide levels, all have an effect on our environment, on our planet, that impacts health across the board,” Haynes said.
Changes in vector ecology lead to changes in the distribution of vector-borne infectious diseases, he explained. Increases in aeroallergens lead to more respiratory diseases and asthma issues, and changes in extreme heat cause more heat-related illnesses and death, he continued.
“Climate change is really fundamentally a health issue for our entire planet,” he said.
Air pollution is a “silent killer” as well, Haynes added, with approximately 7 million excess deaths worldwide due to household and outdoor air pollutants, including more than 2 million in southeast Asia alone.
“These pollutants lead to issues of stroke, heart disease and other respiratory issues,” Haynes said.
The Health & Air Quality Applications Program supports the use of Earth observations in air quality management in public health, including infectious disease, environmental health, toxic and pathogenic exposure, and air quality standards.
“Throughout all the projects in our portfolio, we take a look at these issues through the lens of ‘One Health,’ understanding that human health, environmental health and animal health are all holistically collected,” Haynes said. “You have to look at them as a system.”
Working with public and private partners around the world, the Health & Air Quality Applications Program has more than 30 active projects, which Haynes called the largest it has ever been.
Six cities — Accra, Ghana; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Guadalajara, Mexico; Lima, Peru; and Johannesburg, South Africa — have incorporated program data about particulate matter at the 2.5 µm scale (PM2.5) into their climate action plans.
The Health & Air Quality Applications Program also has been working with the Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium and other state agencies that are concerned with air quality to examine how air quality interacts with meteorology.
“We’ve been able to simulate air pollution along urban coastal boundaries like Lake Michigan, and that’s very challenging,” Haynes said.
“It’s a very complex meteorology, but using high-resolution satellite data, we’ve helped improve models that those states use to demonstrate air pollution containment strategies that are required by the EPA under the Clean Air Act,” he continued.
And although the Clean Air Act has greatly improved air quality nationwide in the 50 years since its passage, Haynes said, “those successes have not been shared equally across major cities across the United States.”
Another project that examined how air quality varies across different areas of Washington, D.C., found that estimated PM2.5 attributable mortality differed by a factor of as much as eight between neighborhoods there. The largest PM2.5 concentrations were in areas with higher proportions of people of color, lower income levels and educational attainment.
“Particularly in the southeast and southwest quadrants of the District of Columbia, where the busiest freeway, the southeast-southwest freeway, is going directly through those neighborhoods,” Haynes said.
These results also suggest that satellite-derived PM2.5 concentrations do not show the extent of these concentrations at street and block levels and would benefit from datasets with even higher resolutions, Haynes added, but a recently launched satellite will provide that information.
“This really shows that we now have to get down into that neighborhood and block level to understand the sources and where air pollution is truly located in our cities,” Haynes said.
“That would also help inform federal agencies like the EPA as well as district or state agencies in environmental quality to know where they need to put those point-ground data sources to help understand the true state of air quality across their region,” he added.
Project teamwork
Now in its third generation, the Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team (HAQAST) comprises 14 principal investigators who serve for 4-year terms in leading core projects that examine environmental health and air quality. Public meetings are held twice a year.
“They also collaborate together through something called Tiger Teams,” Haynes said. “It is really exciting. It’s really unique among NASA and research and development agencies.”
These short-term, high-impact collaborations between HAQAST and stakeholders identify and solve critical problems using NASA data and products. Current topics include environmental justice, oil and gas emissions, and using the Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution or TEMPO satellite to measure surface ozone.
“HAQAST and their mission is bringing the power of NASA science data down to Earth to deliver it to the hands of our stakeholders and the public,” Haynes said.
The Earth Action Program also helps manage the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Health Community of Practice, which is an international consortium of more than a hundred member states and nongovernment organizations that collaborate in a variety of areas that benefit society, Haynes said, including health.
Haynes is the co-chair of GEO Health Community of Practice.
“It serves as a global network of governments, organizations and observers who seek to use the Earth observation data to improve health decisionmaking at international, regional, country and district levels,” Haynes said.
GEO Health Community of Practice work groups focus on health, infectious diseases, air quality, food security and safety, and health care infrastructure, with teleconferences twice a month in addition to other national and international meetings.
“It is a wonderful platform for the globe to come together, to collaborate and cooperate on these issues,” Haynes said.
Finally, two recent additions to the satellite constellation will soon begin contributing data to these and other collaborative efforts.
Earth Venture Instrument-3: Multi-Angle Images for Aerosols (MAIA) represents a sentinel partnership between NASA, the Italian Space Agency and epidemiologists from health organizations on a satellite mission, Haynes said.
“This satellite is going to be targetable,” Haynes said. “Its observations of particulate matter are going to be targeted in mega cities across the globe.”
MAIA will assess linkages between different airborne particulate matter types and adverse birth outcomes, cardiovascular and respiratory disease, and premature deaths. It is expected to launch in 2025.
Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem — or PACE — carries an ocean color instrument that Haynes called the most advanced for observing ocean color in NASA’s history. Launched in February 2024, its multi-angle polarimeter can measure particle sizes and compositions of atmospheric aerosols and ocean color.
“That will be another very important data set for us,” Haynes said.