The NASA Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA): Enhancing Societal Impact through Early Community Engagement

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, 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, PM2.5, and speciated PM2.5 mass concentrations. Epidemiologists on the MAIA Science Team will use these data to conduct studies of different aerosol mixtures on health outcomes in MAIAs Primary Target Areas. Observations will also be collected over a wider set of Secondary Target Areas. The MAIA team anticipates these to data to be of value to epidemiologists, environmental health researchers, air quality agencies, environmental justice advocates, aerosol and climate researchers, and even members of the public interested in their local air quality. MAIAs data products will be publicly available from NASAs Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC), free of charge. However, availability alone will not ensure that the data products will be taken up by the communities of potential, especially given that satellite data is relatively new to several of them. With the objective of maximizing the utility of MAIA data for these communities, the MAIA project and the NASA Applied Sciences Program have partnered on a MAIA Early Adopters Program, which has proactively sought out and engaged with potential users since 2019, employing workshops, webinars, and other tools to gather feedback on user needs and data product decisions. This presentation will cover the development and evolution of the Early Adopters program and highlight the contributions of the MAIA Early Adopter community, which includes 175 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, including in early development.