What’s behind the curtain of the NASA Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission? Training Activity – apply by 11 March 2022

Background
In 2015, NASA directed the PACE mission to Goddard Space Flight Center following recommendations from the 2010 NASA document Responding to the Challenge of Climate and Environmental Change: NASA’s plan for Climate-Centric Architecture for Earth Observations and Applications from Space. This direction ultimately realized the research communities’ decade-plus push for a future Earth-observing satellite mission to meet growing needs for scientific discovery. A central objective of PACE is enabling new insights on the sensitivity of global aquatic ecology and biogeochemistry to environmental change.

While heritage ocean color missions have provided desperately needed platforms for observing grossly under-sampled ocean ecosystems since 1997, the oceanographic community quickly recognized the need for enhanced satellite measurement capabilities to address the additional issues of changing phytoplankton distributions, ecosystem and habitat health, and carbon fluxes in the global oceans. The second objective of PACE is the retrieval of advanced atmospheric data products with the goals of reducing uncertainties in global climate models and improving our interdisciplinary understanding of the ocean-atmosphere system. Despite the substantial achievements of heritage satellite missions, better constraining aerosol and cloud properties and improving our understanding of effective radiative forcing requires significant advances in measurement capabilities. Phrased simply, PACE is NASA’s next great investment in ocean, clouds, and atmospheric data records to enable continued and advanced insight into oceanographic and atmospheric responses to Earth’s changing climate.

Read the proposal