Airborne field campaigns in the geostationary satellite era in North America: Results from AEROMMA and AiRMAPS

Since the launch of TEMPO in 2023, the NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) has conducted airborne field campaigns with support from the NOAA National Environmental and Satellite Data Information Service (NESDIS). The 2023 AEROMMA (Atmospheric Emissions and Reactivity Observed from Megacities to Marine Areas) campaign surveyed major urban areas in North America, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, and New York, with the heavily instrumented NASA DC-8. The 2024 and 2025 AiRMAPS (Airborne and Remote Sensing Multi Air Pollutant Surveys) campaigns surveyed urban areas of Denver, Salt Lake City, and Baltimore–Washington DC, in addition to oil and gas basins in Colorado, Utah, and the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S., with the NOAA Twin Otter and ground-based mobile laboratories.

Here, we present several results from these campaigns. In 2023, widespread smoke impacts from a record-breaking Canadian wildfire season coincided with AEROMMA, providing extensive in-situ observations of smoke, ozone, and its precursors. Vertically-resolved measurements from research flights in Chicago provided constraints on the influence of these fires on urban ozone. The 2024 Utah Summer Ozone Study measured ozone and its precursors in Salt Lake City from a mobile laboratory and the NOAA Twin Otter. Photochemical box modeling and radiative transfer modeling in both cities quantified the effects of ozone transport, local photochemistry, and aerosol shading. These results add to a growing database to quantify the fire influence on ozone in North American cities. Surveys of urban areas and oil and gas basins using a novel airborne Doppler lidar mass balance method have provided new emissions quantification for methane, nitrogen oxides, and other trace gases. These determinations can be compared to emissions estimates from satellite and airborne remote sensing to cross-validate these methods.