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In my job, I get to help make data from the TEMPO instrument publicly available and I
also get to make it usable for young people. My name is Erica Wright and I help make pollution data
something we can all understand. TEMPO stands for Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution.
TEMPO is a satellite instrument funded by NASA. Because it sits in what's called a geostationary
orbit it moves right with the Earth, kind of our selfie stick standing out there and it measures
on an hourly basis. That means it can scan from East Coast to West Coast every hour giving us
a much more complete picture of what's happening in our air quality. I'm currently working with the
Cosmic Data Stories team to help build a special interface to help folks understand the nitrogen
dioxide data coming from the TEMPO instrument and allow you to ask those questions with the
data and compare from city to city what's going on in your backyard. I think it's really important
for all of us to understand our air quality. It impacts us both in our own health but also
in the world and community around us and helping young people who have their very own important
questions about air quality have access is so critical to our future. I've always loved the
environment myself. I'm lucky enough that I get to help make that data accessible to others. When
I was younger, I really thought I wanted to be a doctor, and then when I was at college I realized
maybe that wasn't quite exactly what was right for me. I was a Biology major and I was lucky enough
one summer to lead some science summer camps for younger kids, and that ability to help young people
explore their own passion for science was such an inspiring moment for me that I then went on
to work in science museums for a period, including the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum and then
luckily enough found this amazing job where I get to connect both my love for inspiring others
and real scientific work and engaging with real data together. I love the challenge of thinking
about how we can make this data accessible. It's so complicated. TEMPO is actually
terabytes worth of data and there's so many different types of it and so to be able to
ask your own questions when you're just learning about air quality is really complicated. And so I
love thinking about how those interfaces work so that somebody just dipping their toe in and
asking their first question won't be overwhelmed. So I'm building data interfaces that'll allow
you to ask your very own questions of this data and actually look for your own answers.
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