Title of Presentation: Sensor-web Operations Explorer (SOX) for Earth Atmospheric Science Experiment

Primary (Corresponding) Author: Meemong Lee

Organization of Primary Author:

Co-Authors: Richard Weidner, Charles Millier, Kevin Bowman, Adrian Sandu, Kumaresh Singh

Abstract: Any future air quality mission will face significant measurement strategy design and implementation challenges. Characterizing the atmospheric state and its impact on air quality requires observations of trace gases (e.g., O3, CO, NO2, SO2), aerosols (e.g., size and shape distributions, composition), clouds (e.g., type, height, sky coverage,) and physical parameters (e.g., temperature, pressure, humidity) across temporal and spatial scales that range from minutes to days and from meters to >10,000 km.. Validating satellite measurements is another major challenge and requires well organized and orchestrated sub-orbital sensor web deployments. No single sensor, instrument, platform, or network can provide all of the information necessary to address this issue.

Toward achieving the multi-dimensional observation coverage, constellation of spacecrafts, integrated air-borne campaigns, and distributed sensor networks have been actively pursued. How to formulate the complex design trade space? How to explore the trade space rapidly? How to establish evaluation metrics? How to coordinate observations optimally? This paper will discuss an on-going Sensor-web Operations Explorer (SOX) research task under NASA Earth Science Technology Office, which addresses these challenges by creating a virtual sensor-web experiment framework that can support orbital and sub-orbital observation system simulation experiment. The virtual sensor-web experiment framework provides rapid exploration of dynamically configured air quality measurement scenarios. The framework also assesses the optimality of a measurement scenario employing objective performance metrics in terms of science information content, reduced prediction uncertainty, and improved forecasting skill.