ASIA-AQ: Airborne Air Quality Measurements Over Asia, Jan-Mar 2024

NASA's ASIA-AQ project provides analysis flag files and in-situ aerosol data collected onboard a DC-8 aircraft during an international air quality campaign. The campaign was conducted from January to March 2024 over the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand. Data collection is complete and the dataset is licensed under CC-BY-4.0.

Use Cases

• Validate and interpret satellite observations from instruments like GEMS based on in-situ aircraft measurements.
• Quantify and verify emissions from biomass burning and other combustion processes using analysis flag files.
• Evaluate regional air quality models based on detailed aerosol chemistry and ozone chemistry data.
• Study the vertical structure of air masses and pollution layers identified in the analysis data.

Strengths

• Data collection is complete for the described products.
• Campaign involved international partnership with local scientists and agencies in four Asian countries.
• Includes data from multiple sophisticated instruments (e.g., Aerosol Mass Spectrometer, Transmission Electron Microscopy).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

NASA

Collection Method

Collected via in-situ and remote sensing instruments onboard a DC-8 aircraft during a coordinated field campaign.

Time Range

January 2024 - March 2024

Freshness

Data collection period was January-March 2024; last update date is unknown.

Geography

Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand