Published October 9, 2020 | Version v1
Preprint Open

The Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation: An Earth Science Imaging Spectroscopy Mission

Creators

  • 1. 1Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
  • 2. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
  • 3. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
  • 4. 3Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, AZ, USA
  • 5. University of Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel
  • 6. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
  • 7. NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY, USA
  • 8. University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
  • 9. Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain
  • 10. NASA Headquarter, Washington, DC, USA
  • 11. US Geological Survey, Golden, CO, USA

Description

The Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source
Investigation, EMIT, is planned to operate from the
International Space Station starting no earlier than the fall of
2021. EMIT will use visible to short wavelength infrared
imaging spectroscopy to determine the mineral composition of
the arid land dust source regions of the Earth to advance our
knowledge of the radiative forcing effect of these aerosols.
Mineral dust emitted into the atmosphere under high wind
conditions is an element of the Earth system with many impacts
to the Earth’s energy balance, atmosphere, surface, and oceans.
The Earth’s mineral dust cycle with source, transport, and
deposition phases are studied with advanced Earth System
Models. Because the chemical composition, optical and surface
properties of soil particles vary strongly with the mineral
composition of the source, these models require knowledge of
surface soil mineral dust source composition to accurately
understand dust impacts on the Earth system now and in the
future. At present, compositional knowledge of the Earth’s
mineral dust source regions from existing data sets is uncertain
as a result of limited measurements. EMIT will use
spectroscopically-derived surface mineral composition to
update the prescribed boundary conditions for state-of-the-art
Earth System Models. The EMIT-initialized models will be used
to investigate the impact of direct radiative forcing in the Earth
system that depends strongly on the composition of the mineral
dust aerosols emitted into the atmosphere. These new
measurements and related products will be used to address the
EMIT science objectives and made available to the science
community for additional investigations. An overview of the
EMIT science, development, and mission is presented in this
paper.

Notes

The authors gratefully acknowledge NASA and the Earth System Science Pathfinder program office as well as the broad set of contributors to the EMIT mission. A portion of this work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory / California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Files

paper_EMIT_IEEE_draft_201910017c_s_preprint.pdf

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Additional details

Funding

FRAGMENT – FRontiers in dust minerAloGical coMposition and its Effects upoN climaTe 773051
European Commission