Earth Science Focus Areas

Arc-Crest supported research groups working in the Earth Science Focus Areas specialize in one of three sub-fields of research: Atmospheric composition, climate variability and change, or the carbon cycle and ecosystems.

Research groups in atmospheric composition use global observations of ozone and aerosols from space, augmented by suborbital and ground-based measurements, to investigate questions like:

  • How is atmospheric composition changing?
  • What trends in atmospheric composition and solar radiation influence global climate?
  • How does atmospheric composition respond to and affect global environmental change?
  • What are the effects of global atmospheric composition and climate changes on regional air quality?
  • How will future changes in atmospheric composition affect ozone, climate, and global air quality?

Research groups in climate variability and change are working to fully understand all of the physical processes that contribute to climate variability and change. These researchers are helping to eliminate climate model uncertainties, building new models that can utilize and apply the wealth of new earth observations data, and providing accurate and usable datasets of earth observations to the larger scientific community. The ultimate objective of this work is to enable predictions of climatic changes on time scales ranging from seasonal to multi-decadal, which is critical to the effective management of natural resources in the future.

Research groups focusing on the carbon cycle and ecosystems study the distribution and cycling of carbon between land, ocean, and atmospheric reservoirs. Research projects in this area also examine how ecosystems change due to biogeochemistry, climate variations, and human interaction. This research aims to improve climate projections for the next 50-100 years by providing key inputs for climate models, such as projections of future atmospheric CO2 and CH4 concentrations. Research groups in this area are working to quantify global productivity, carbon fluxes, and changes in land cover, as well as provide useful projections of future changes in global carbon cycling.

Research Groups
    1. 4STAR and Satellite Data Analysis
    2. Arctic Radiation-Ice Bridge Sea Ice Experiment (ARISE)
    3. Atmospheric Composition Campaign Data Analysis and Modeling (ACCDAM)
    4. Asian Summer Monsoon Chemical & CLimate Impact Project (ACCLIP) / Carbon mOnoxide Measurement from Ames (COMA)
    5. Aerosol Modeling & Data Analysis
    6. Alpha Jet Atmospheric Experiment (AJAX)
    7. Atmospheric Composition: Modeling and Analysis Program (ACMAP)
    8. Carbon Monitoring Systems (CMS)
    9. Earth System Data Records (ESDR)
    10. Fluid Lensing Technology Acceleration (FLA)
    11. Coastal Ocean Biology
    12. CRis PAN
    13. Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI)
    14. GeoCarb
    15. Indianapolis Flux Experiment (INFLUX) and Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON)
    16. Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environment (MEaSUREs)
    17. The Marine Biodiversity and Scaling Project (MarineVERSE)
    18. MiDAR
    19. NASA Earth Exchange (NEX)
    20. Neural Multimodal observation and training network for global coral reef assessment (NeMO-NET)
    21. OCEMOD
    22. Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2)
    23. Peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN) from AIRS (AIRS-PAN)
    24. PICOGRAM
    25. Plant Physiology
    26. RUMMBL
    27. SeaSTAR
    28. Surface Biology and Geology (SBG)
    29. TASNPP
    30. Terrestrial Ecosystem and Carbon Simulation Modeling
    31. Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES)
    32. U.S. Coral Reef Task Force
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