Bath Researchers Join NASA Earth System Explorers Mission
The team is working with NASA to unlock insights into our atmosphere, helping to predict extreme weather, track pollution, and monitor the recovery of the ozone layer
Bath researchers Dr Neil Hindley and Professor Corwin Wright, from the University of Bath’s Centre for Climate Adaptation & Environment Research (CAER), have joined the science team behind NASA’s next-generation satellite mission.
The STRIVE mission, which stands for Stratosphere Troposphere Response using Infrared Vertically-resolved light Explorer, will take high-resolution, daily measurements of global temperature, aerosol pollution and ozone levels throughout the Earth’s atmosphere. These observations will help improve longer-range weather and air quality forecasts, and strengthen early warnings for extreme weather, particularly for vulnerable coastal communities, where almost half of the world’s population lives.
The Bath team will focus on understanding atmospheric waves, the ripples of energy that travel around Earth and drive our daily weather and global climate. By understanding and predicting how these waves transport energy and momentum, researchers hope to better predict environmental impacts such as extreme weather and long-term climate projections.
Dr Hindley, a Senior Research Fellow in CAER, explained: “The atmosphere is made up of several, deeply interconnected layers. As a rule of thumb, the further forward in time you want to predict, the more of the atmosphere you need to understand and simulate – and this usually means going upwards.
“STRIVE will be able to see these waves in full 3-D for the first time. Our role in the Science Team is to analyse these wave signatures and measure their momentum transport, breaking and deposition throughout the middle atmosphere, using cutting-edge 3-D spectral analysis techniques pioneered at Bath.”
STRIVE measurements will provide unprecedented insights into the dynamics and chemistry of the middle atmosphere, the dynamic region 10 to 100 km above the Earth’s surface. Understanding how it circulates will help forecasters create better numerical climate simulations, improving how far ahead we can reliably predict weather and climate, potentially extending forecasting from weeks to full seasons.
As part of the development phase of the mission, the Bath team tested how STRIVE will observe the atmosphere once in orbit.
Dr Hindley added: “In collaboration with our US partners, we flew a virtual satellite through an ultra-high-resolution model of the atmosphere, sampling fields such as temperature exactly as STRIVE will see it. This gave us a suite of synthetic measurements to develop our 3D analysis tools, so that we’re ready for the real data after launch.”
The observations will also help improve modelling of the upper atmosphere, where satellites orbit the Earth. Here, at the edge of space, volatile atmospheric conditions can cause sudden and dramatic changes in the drag experienced by satellites, which can have serious consequences. Improved understanding of the causes of these conditions from STRIVE observations will lead to improved forecast modelling, which will support safer and more reliable satellite operations.
The mission is led by Professor Lyatt Jaeglé at the University of Washington in Seattle, and is one of two new Earth System Explorers missions selected by NASA to improve understanding of the atmosphere and support faster, more informed decision-making during extreme weather events.
Professor Jaeglé said: “The STRIVE mission will help us close one of the biggest blind spots in our observing system, the middle atmosphere. By resolving it in unprecedented detail, we’ll improve our ability to predict extreme weather, track pollution and wildfire smoke, and monitor the recovery of the ozone layer.
“We greatly value the scientific contributions from our UK partners at the University of Bath, Neil Hindley and Corwin Wright. They bring key deep expertise in gravity wave science and are pioneers in spectral 3D analysis of the type of data that STRIVE will provide.”
Both missions are currently in development and will undergo further review in 2027. If approved, they are expected to launch from 2030.
