EMIT - Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation

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The effects of airborne dust go beyond congesting noses, irritating lungs, and covering windshields with a gritty film.  Research has shown that dust can fertilize rainforests and algae blooms while also affecting the rate at which snow melts, and there is more to learn about how dust might affect climate and weather.  NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) mission aims to advance climate researchers’ understanding of those effects.

Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), EMIT is providing significantly more detail than previously available about the composition and colour of surface minerals in the regions of the planet that produce the most dust.  Researchers will use this information to refine climate models, which currently can account for the temperature effects of atmospheric dust.

All of EMIT’s currently processed data products are available through the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center. More than 18,000 EMIT image cube data sets from six continents have been delivered to date.  The planned EMIT prime mission lifetime is one year.

In February, three informative workshops were held to showcase how to find, access, and work with EMIT radiance and reflectance data products:

  • Workshop 1 - Intro to EMIT Mission and Data

  • Workshop 2 - Working with EMIT Data: Basics

  • Workshop 3 - Working with EMIT Data: Advanced

The recordings for all workshops are available from the link below.