The first annual joint NASA Plankton Aerosol Cloud ocean Ecosystem (PACE) Science Team Meeting (PAC3) was held at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, NY from February 18 – 21, 2025. This event brought together over 100 scientists from the PACE Science and Applications Team, researchers funded to use PACE data for new scientific directions; the PACE Validation Science Team, researchers who have field observations that will be used to validate PACE measurements; and, team members of the PACE-PAX field campaign, the recent airborne study that underflew PACE with compatible remote sensing instruments over the southwestern US.
ESI’s multi-angle polarimeter instruments, HARP2, one of three main payloads on the NASA PACE satellite, and AirHARP2, its airborne counterpart, were focal points in discussion and collaborative effort across the three PACE teams. During PAC3, ESI director Dr. J. Vanderlei Martins gave an overview of current calibration and data processing efforts with HARP2. ESI scientist Dr. Lorraine Remer discussed new results from her team’s aerosol retrieval algorithm applied to data from the PACE Ocean Color Instrument (OCI). ESI scientist Dr. Brent McBride spoke to the members of PACE-PAX about the current calibration and data processing effort for the AirHARP2 instrument, a suite of four remote sensors that flew on the high-altitude NASA ER-2 aircraft during the campaign. ESI scientist Dr. Xiaoguang Xu also participated in person, and other ESI scientists and graduate students joined remotely throughout the week.
Photo: PAC3 participants, including international partners, NASA civil servants, graduate students, and ESI scientists Drs. J. Vanderlei Martins, Xiaoguang Xu, and Brent McBride. Photo Credit: Kirk Knobelspiesse/NASA GSFC.