By Erica McNamee of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD 

As a kid, you were always taught to hold tight to balloons—tie them around your wrist, even, to keep them close. This week, a group of a dozen undergraduate students participating in NASA’s 2026 Student Airborne Research Program (SARP), unlearned old balloon-wrangling habits—and let go. 

Their purpose:  to collect data about the atmosphere with the help of a weather balloon. For this fieldwork day, in a windy area on the Texas Gulf Coast, the group released an ozonesonde, a small instrument attached to a weather balloon that measures ozone concentrations as it rises through the atmosphere.   

“I’ve never done any atmospheric fieldwork outside like this, so this has been an awesome new opportunity for me,” said Marin Stevens, SARP intern and chemistry student from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.  

With the support of program mentors and faculty, and aboard the University of Houston’s Mobile Air Quality Laboratory (MAQL), the SARP interns participated in every step of the process.  

Let’s set the scene: About 45 minutes away from this year’s SARP home base at the Lone Star Flight Museum in Houston, the MAQL drove down the Texas City Dike, a long strip of land jutting into the Texas Gulf Coast—an open space perfect for releasing the weather balloon. Among the 45 total students in the program, this group was assigned to meet the mobile lab at the balloon release location at  8 a.m. Central Time, just after a rainstorm rolled through. 

Inside the lab, the students prepared ozonesondes for takeoff, completing the final steps that include measuring and pipetting cathode and anode solutions into the instrument cells attached to the sensor and testing each instrument’s response and baseline. 

Outside the mobile laboratory, gusts of wind made it difficult to keep the balloon still while it was being filled with helium. Four students donned leather gloves to minimize oils from their fingers touching the balloon, which can make it pop faster after deployment. They wrangled the balloon while faculty advisor Travis Griggs, instructional assistant professor of atmospheric science from the University of Houston, filled it.  

Five students worked together to keep the balloon from flying away as they strung it to the ozonesonde, protected in a small foam container. 

After confirming the launch location, time, and expected flight path with the Federal Aviation Administration (just a phone call away), it was time to set the weather instrument free.   

“It was like a fight to stay on the ground, with the balloon whipping around in the wind,” said Zayna Haider, SARP intern and atmospheric and climate science student from the University of Washington. “It just flew away as soon as we let it go.” 

But the work had only just begun. The students huddled back inside the MAQL, monitoring data as long as the balloon kept sending it—until it popped or landed, whichever came first. Throughout the day, they repeated this process with two other balloons.  

This day gave many SARP participants, just starting their science careers, their first glimpse at hands-on fieldwork that reached the edges of the atmosphere. Next, they would use this data and what they learned from the experience for their end-of-internship research presentation.  

“This is beyond what I ever thought it could be,” Stevens said. “I’m super excited for the next seven weeks.” 

The post Up, Up, and Away With Weather Balloons  appeared first on NASA Science.

Wildfire smoke is stoking a new challenge for cleaner air. A NASA-supported study published Thursday found that, over the last decade, wildfires have worsened ground-level ozone pollution across much of the contiguous United States, creating unhealthy air far from active flames.

Wildfires have become an increasingly important contributor to ground-level ozone, or smog, across much of the United States, researchers report June 4 in the journal Science. Nationally, fires offset nearly four years’ worth of ozone-control gains, with larger setbacks in the West and Midwest.

Smoke often is associated with the soot, ash, and other fine particles that make the air look hazy. But wildfires also emit gases such as carbon monoxide, which can help form surface ozone in sunlight when other pollutants are present. Surface ozone is an invisible pollutant harmful to human health, plants, and crops. As smoke plumes travel and mix with other pollution, those reactions can drive ozone increases hundreds or even thousands of miles from active fires.

“NASA Earth observations, along with ground monitoring networks, help reveal air quality risks from wildfires that can cross state lines, giving air quality managers better decision-making information as wildfire smoke affects more communities,” said John Haynes, manager of NASA Earth Action’s Health and Air Quality program at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. “This is a strong example of NASA science serving communities here in the U.S.”

Building a clearer ozone picture

High in the atmosphere, ozone shields Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation. Near the ground, however, ozone can irritate lungs, worsen asthma and other respiratory diseases, and increase health risks for children, older adults, outdoor workers, and people with existing health conditions.

To track surface ozone changes, researchers turned to deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence that finds patterns across large datasets. They used it to build a first-of-its-kind dataset estimating daily surface ozone from 2003 to 2024 on a kilometer-by-kilometer grid — about 0.6 miles on each side — across the contiguous U.S. The work received support from NASA’s Health and Air Quality program and other NASA grants.

The scientists combined data from about 1,000 ground-based air quality stations with atmospheric model data, weather information, wildfire pollution data, and satellite-derived information, including products from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments.

Their analysis revealed two distinct periods. From 2003 to 2015, U.S. ground-level ozone generally declined as emissions of ozone-forming pollutants decreased. After 2015, however, those gains slowed or reversed in many places. By comparing estimated ozone levels with scenarios that removed wildfire influence, the researchers found that pollution from wildfires was a main factor in that shift.

Without the wildfire contribution, ground-level ozone in the Midwest, for example, would likely have continued to decline. Instead, wildfires erased about 5.3 years’ worth of ozone-control progress since 2015.

“People in the Midwest may think fires burning far away will not affect them,” said the study’s corresponding author Jun Wang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. “But once wildfire pollution is in the air, it can move across regions. Pollution from one place can affect air quality in another.”

Measuring the health toll

The study also found that wildfire-driven ozone increased exposure to unhealthy air and likely contributed to premature deaths. Premature deaths associated with long-term wildfire-related ozone exposure in the U.S. increased by an estimated 318 deaths per year after 2013, with the post-2013 average 46% higher than in the previous decade. The researchers calculated premature deaths using average lifespan, ozone exposure estimates, and population density.

The 2023 Canadian wildfires showed how widely those risks can spread, with smoke-driven ozone increases stretching across the Midwest and into parts of the Northeast and South. Overall, from 2022 to 2024, wildfires exposed an additional 43 million people in the U.S. to conditions that did not meet current federal air quality standards for ozone, the researchers estimated.

Capturing that national picture is difficult from ground monitors alone. Ground monitors remain the backbone of U.S. air quality tracking, but they do not cover every community. NASA’s scientifically validated satellite observations and models help researchers and agencies see air quality patterns across states, regions, and fire seasons.

That broader air quality work includes newer missions such as TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution). Launched in 2023, TEMPO is NASA’s first mission to use a space-based spectrometer to provide hourly daytime measurements of air quality over North America. Its view is sharp enough to distinguish pollution patterns, including surface ozone, across areas only a few square miles wide, a major improvement over earlier satellites.

Together, these capabilities help researchers and agencies see smoke-related ozone patterns that might otherwise be harder to detect, especially in rural and remote areas.

The work also points toward a practical use of NASA science during fire season. Wang’s team has used NASA support to develop FireAQ, a decision-support system that brings satellite observations, model forecasts, and fire and aerosol products into weekly briefings with state and local air quality officials. The goal is to help officials see where smoke-related pollution may move next and give communities better information.