Uniting Satellite Data With Health Records to Address the Societal Impacts of Particulate Air Pollution: NASA's Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols

Epidemiological studies have demonstrated convincingly that airborne particulate matter has a major impact on human health, particularly in urban areas. However, providing an accurate picture of the health effects of various particle mixtures — distinguished by size, shape, and composition — is difficult due to the constraints of currently available measurement tools and the heterogeneity of atmospheric chemistry and human activities over space and time. The Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) investigation, currently in development as part of NASA's Earth Venture Instrument Program, will address this issue through a powerful combination of technologies and informatics. Atmospheric measurements collected by the MAIA satellite instrument featuring multiangle and innovative polarimetric imaging capabilities will be combined with available ground monitor data and a chemical transport model to produce maps of speciated particulate matter at 1 km spatial resolution for a selected set of globally distributed cities. The MAIA investigation is also original in integrating data providers (atmospheric scientists), data users (epidemiologists), and stakeholders (public health experts) into a multidisciplinary science team that will tailor the observation and analysis strategy within each target area to improve our understanding of the linkages between different particle types and adverse human health outcomes.