Sensor-web Operations Explorer (SOX) for Earth Science Air Quality Mission Concepts

Future air quality missions 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., ozone [O₃], carbon monoxide [CO], nitrogen dioxide [NO₂], sulfur dioxide [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 it 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. Constellations of spacecraft, integrated air-borne campaigns, and distributed sensor networks have been actively pursued to achieve the needed multi-dimensional observation coverage. However, these complicated sensor webs must address how to formulate the complex design trade space, how to explore the trade space rapidly, how to establish evaluation metrics, and how to coordinate observations optimally. The Sensor-web Operations Explorer (SOX) research task under the NASA Earth Science Technology Office addresses these challenges by creating a virtual sensor-web experiment framework that can support orbital and sub-orbital observation system simulation experiment.