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NASA cancels lease for Earth science office in New York

2025-04-24 - 2025-04

BOSTON-NASA is canceling the lease for the offices of a branch of the Goddard Space Flight Center in New York that does Earth science research.

In an April 24 email to Goddard employees, Makenzie Lystrup, director of Goddard Space Flight Center, said that the lease the agency has for office space in a Columbia University building will end May 31. Those offices host the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), part of Goddard's Earth science division.

Lystrup said the decision to terminate the lease was linked to ongoing reviews by the current administration of all government leases, but did not give further details on the decision, including whether it was made by NASA or outside the agency, such as the Department of Government Efficiency.
GISS has been in New York since its founding in 1961, established there "on the premise that conducting theoretical research in the space sciences would be facilitated by being near the leading universities in the greater metropolitan area," GISS explains on its website. It has been in its current offices, in a building known as Armstrong Hall, since the late 1960s.

GISS is best known for its work in climate sciences, modeling changes caused by natural and human-made phenomena. The institute has been led since 2014 by Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist who served as the agency's acting senior climate adviser in 2021. More than 130 people work at GISS, according to an online staff directory.

NASA leases more than 4,000 square meters (43,000 square feet) in the building, paying an annual rent of $3.03 million, according to data from the General Services Administration confirmed by a NASA spokesperson. That lease was set to run through August 2031.

While NASA is terminating the lease on the GISS offices, it is not closing the institute itself. Lystrup said in the email that it will help employees move "to remote work agreements in the short-term as the agency seeks a new, permanent space for the team."

"And while the lease is ending, the Institute's mission continues,"she added. "The work of the GISS team is considered critical for the Earth Science Division, particularly as the Division looks to the future of its modeling work and capabilities."

However, agency sources said they are concerned that GISS could become a victim of budget cuts. A draft "passback" budget proposal for NASA delivered to the agency earlier this month by the Office of Management and Budget proposed cutting NASA's Earth science budget by more than 50% to about $1 billion in fiscal year 2026.

Earth Science Data Roundup: April 2025

2025-04-04 - 2025-04

Earth Science Data Roundup: April 2025
A summary of datasets, products, and resources released by NASA's Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) in March 2025.
Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC)
Airborne and Satellite Investigation of Asian Air Quality (ASIA-AQ) Dataset Released
NASA's ASDC released new datasets from the Airborne and Satellite Investigation of Asian Air Quality (ASIA-AQ) campaign. The ASIA-AQ campaign was an international cooperative field study designed to address local air quality challenges. Conducted from January to March 2024, ASIA-AQ deployed multiple aircraft to collect in-situ and remote sensing measurements, along with numerous ground-based observations and modeling assessments.

Data were collected over four countries-the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand-and flights were conducted in full partnership with local scientists and the environmental agencies responsible for air quality monitoring and assessment. One of the primary goals of ASIA-AQ was to enhance the integration of satellite observations with existing air quality ground monitoring and modeling efforts across Asia. Air quality observations from satellites are evolving with new capabilities from South Korea's Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS), which conducts hourly measurements to provide a new view of air quality conditions from space that complements and depends upon ground-based monitoring efforts of countries in its field-of-view.

Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC)
Airborne and Satellite Investigation of Asian Air Quality (ASIA-AQ) Dataset Released
NASA's ASDC released new datasets from the Airborne and Satellite Investigation of Asian Air Quality (ASIA-AQ) campaign. The ASIA-AQ campaign was an international cooperative field study designed to address local air quality challenges. Conducted from January to March 2024, ASIA-AQ deployed multiple aircraft to collect in-situ and remote sensing measurements, along with numerous ground-based observations and modeling assessments.

Data were collected over four countries the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand'and flights were conducted in full partnership with local scientists and the environmental agencies responsible for air quality monitoring and assessment. One of the primary goals of ASIA-AQ was to enhance the integration of satellite observations with existing air quality ground monitoring and modeling efforts across Asia. Air quality observations from satellites are evolving with new capabilities from South Korea's Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS), which conducts hourly measurements to provide a new view of air quality conditions from space that complements and depends upon ground-based monitoring efforts of countries in its field-of-view.

Access data and more information about the ASIA-AQ campaign.

Image
The orange frame in this graphic shows the observing domain for South Korea's Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer.
Image Caption
This graphic shows the observing domain for GEMS (orange box) and candidate locations for airborne sampling during ASIA-AQ. Yellow circles indicate the original areas of interest and engagement, while red circles indicate the locations still under negotiation for flight sampling. Candidate locations include Seoul, South Korea; Tokyo, Japan; Taiwan; Manila, Philippines; Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Bangkok, Thailand; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Singapore; Dhaka, Bangladesh; and Kolkata and Delhi, India. Credit: ASIA-AQ

Global Hydrometeorology Resource Center Distributed Active Archive Center (GHRC DAAC)
ALOFT ER-2 Navigation Dataset Released
NASA's GHRC DAAC released the NASA ER-2 Navigation dataset from the ALOFT Airborne Lightning Observatory for the Fly's Eye GLM Simulator (FEGS) and Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes (TGFs) campaign. The dataset contains information recorded by the onboard navigation and data collection systems of NASA's ER-2 high-altitude research aircraft. In addition to typical navigation data (e.g., date, time, latitude/longitude, and altitude), the dataset also contains outside meteorological parameters such as wind speed, wind direction, and temperature. The ALOFT field campaign aimed to observe TGFs in one of the most TGF-intense regions on the planet, to observe gamma-ray glows in thunderstorms and their relation to TGFs, to perform International Space Station Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) and Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) validation using improved suborbital instrumentation, to evaluate new design concepts for next-generation spaceborne lightning mappers, and to make combined microwave and lightning measurements of tropical convection from a suborbital platform. The ALOFT navigation dataset files are available from June 15, 2023, through July 31, 2023, and are in ASCII format.

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NASA cancels lease for Earth science office in New York

Earth Science Data Roundup: April 2025