Landslides in Alaska. Air quality in Atlanta. Clouds of fire in the west. From the Arctic fringe to agricultural areas, NASA’s new class of Earth Venture suborbital missions is preparing to deliver science that will benefit communities in the United States and beyond.

The six projects will mobilize hundreds of scientists and pilots from NASA, the US Navy, universities and other institutions over the coming years. While research covers a variety of topics, a defining characteristic of suborbital missions is the use of aircraft-mounted sensors.

Aerial remote sensing serves as a bridge between ground-based instruments and satellites. Data collected by planes, helicopters, drones and balloons can fill gaps in computer models used by weather forecasters, urban planners and others.

The first project to take off this summer is the Injected Smoke and PYRocumulonimbus Experiment (INSPYRE), led by the Naval Research Laboratory. From the mission headquarters in Colorado, the team will pursue one of the least understood forms of severe weather on Earth: the towering “fire clouds” generated when extreme wildfires burn hot enough to generate their own storms.

These unique storms, filled with smoke and lightning, can create blind spots for aviators in the sky and spark new fires in the sky. Measuring and mapping dangerous storms as they develop in real time will help scientists forecast them in the future. Several aircraft, including NASA’s high-altitude ER-2, which will fly from Montana, will carry a large suite of instruments on storm systems generated by wildfires. Among them will be two next-generation infrared wildfire trackers, which were developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California and will fly as part of the agency’s FireSense program.

Agricultural emissions represent an important and understudied part of the Earth’s terrestrial and atmospheric systems. The FarmFlux mission, which begins this year, will deploy more than a dozen sensors to measure ozone, methane, ammonia, particulate matter and other pollutants arising from agricultural lands and animal farms stretching from the Midwest to California’s Central Valley. These emissions affect human health, global climate and stratospheric ozone. The mission is led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, along with Colorado State University and Boston University.

Two North American cities with air quality concerns are Atlanta and Mexico City. But the causes differ, and climate and terrain play a role. To explore these differences, the Hemispheric Airborne Measurements of Air Quality (HAMAQ) mission will investigate areas with poor air in the two capitals and test how satellite information can aid forecasting and mitigation efforts. The team will deploy two aircraft at different altitudes: NASA’s P-3B will fly near the surface, directly measuring fine particles and gaseous pollutants, while the recently acquired 777 science plane will soar high above, mapping pollution with remote sensors. NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, is leading the mission.

As the Arctic warms at least twice as fast as the rest of the Earth, data collected today can help guide communities on the front lines of change.

The Snow4Flow campaign, led by the University of Arizona, seeks to measure and model how far and fast glaciers are retreating in the far north. Traversing remote ice landscapes across Alaska, the Yukon, Arctic Canada, Greenland and Svalbard, Norway, they will probe both the near surface and frozen depths of hundreds of glaciers as they fly overhead in a retrofitted World War II aircraft equipped with a scanning laser altimeter and two custom radars. Their observations, combined with satellite data and advanced models of snowfall and glacier flow, will improve our understanding of how glaciers behave in different regions of the Arctic. The mission seeks to discover not only what these glaciers look like below the surface today, but also the processes that will drive changes in the future.

As permafrost melts, rivers at the gates of the Arctic become conveyor belts of carbon and sediment. NASA’s Goddard and the City College of New York lead a multidisciplinary team studying how the rivers, lagoons and estuaries of Alaska’s North Slope interact with the Arctic Ocean. The project, called Frontlines of Rapidly Transforming Ecosystems (FORTE), will combine optical and radar measurements from satellites, aircraft, high-tech research vessels, drones and autonomous underwater systems to track microscopic marine life, water flow and chemistry. The team will collaborate with local and tribal communities to sustain observations over time and apply NASA resources to address emerging local needs and decision-making priorities.

When a slow-moving landslide in California suddenly collapsed and buried a section of coastal highway in 2017, scientists at NASA JPL wanted to know how rainfall oscillations influenced it. JPL studies how water infiltrates and destabilizes hillsides around the world. The Landslide Characterization of Change Experiment (LACCE) project will combine airborne synthetic aperture radar with ground-based sensors to track how California’s slopes are responding to a world of increasingly intense droughts and downpours. The project also targets emerging landslide hazards in Alaska, where rapidly retreating glaciers are accelerating slope movements that have the potential to create megatsunamis.

NASA’s Earth Venture Suborbital program, designed to be agile and high-impact, was established following a recommendation from the National Research Council in 2007. In the decades since, teams have studied phenomena including blizzards, coral reefs and ocean eddies.