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Marcela Loria-Salazar

Image of Marcela Loria-Salazar

Employer: University of Oklahoma School of Meteorology
Title: Professor of Air Quality
Location: Oklahoma
Research Area: Air Quality in Oklahoma and the Great Plains, specifically for the Southern Plains Tribe
Pathfinder Topic: Air Quality and Smoke Plumes

  • Marcela works at the University of Oklahoma’s School of Meteorology and was one of the first professors in Oklahoma to be hired for the study of air quality.  She studies aerosols and aerosol transport using different platforms. One is with measurements, and one is with satellite retrievals. Marcela has also created applications from plume injection heights and identified ways to use them for air quality monitoring. She also assimilates satellite data to data fishing models. Through working with polar orbiting satellites, she can fill gaps created by clouds. She and her team take the retrievals and try to forecast how to get the AOD full picture by attempting to remove the cloud and create the AOD retrieval from that using polar satellites. She wants to move toward using the scenario data to have more data points and more observations.
  • Another example of her work is with the assimilation of AOD and FRP.  Her team also uses hazard map tools to understand how smoke gets transported and then develop forecasts of air quality due to smoke.  To get around the cloud coverage, she and her team have developed machine learning techniques to fill gaps of AOD.  With those efforts, they have produced a ten-year product that maintains higher spatial resolution than modern-era retrospective analysis for research applications (MERRA-2) for completing smoke plumes.
  • One of Marcela’s challenges is the ability to see the smoke plumes in a vertical fashion.  She does have good horizontal data and if she could get data every 15 minutes or so, she and her team would have clearer vertical data.  So even though the accuracy is better with polar orbiting satellites, she could obtain daily exposures with geostationary.  Additionally, she would like to obtain more recent years data (2020-2022) and increased temporal resolution if possible.

Relevant Satellite Products, Data, and Tools

Marcela primarily uses polar orbiting satellites alongside ground-based sensing and hazard map tools. She uses both NOAA and NASA products to include MODIS, VIIRS, AOD and FRP for aerosol absorption quality changes through smoke transport. She also uses NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem (PACE).  One analysis focuses on the smoke plume is from long range transport or a local fire and then using ground-based sensing to understand absorption, particle depth, and satellite signals.