Climate Science Gets a Boost...From Space!

Climate science is about to get a boost in efforts to measure global changes from space monitoring, both from NASA and the European Union’s space program. While thinking of NASA, one may usually think of going to the moon or the famed Hubble telescope looking across eons of time into our universe’s distant past. However, NASA and other space exploration efforts have a lot of potential to contribute to science—particularly climate science—by turning its attention back downward, toward Earth.

That is why the Obama administration has proposed a new NASA budget that includes a $2.4 billion increase over the next five years for NASA’s Earth Science Division. This represents a 60% increase and a major turnaround after the division was left to languish during the first part of this decade without enough resources to replace aging satellites that perform essential Earth-monitoring tasks, like polar ice, ocean temperatures, and atmospheric chemistry. Such measurements are extremely important in assessing the state and pace of climate change, and much of the new money will be focused on reinvigorating projects that determine just how quickly the Earth’s climate is changing.

One problem for climate scientists is that little is known about what happens to carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, once it gets into the atmosphere, and determining the carbon exchanges between the atmosphere and ocean and the atmosphere and land require a variety of precise measurements. So, a major chunk of the new funding will be to replace the Orbital Carbon Observatory that crashed into the ocean last year not long after being launched. As the name suggests, the new satellite would measure atmospheric carbon levels over time.

Additionally, NASA hopes to replace the GRACE satellites, a pair of twin satellites that have been making detailed measurements of Earth’s gravitational field since 2002. While gravitational fields are certainly important to physicists, the GRACE satellites have produced many more practical applications than anyone initially expected, such as using gravitational fields to measure the amount of and change in ground water over time. This is essential in predicting areas of potential water scarcity, as well as providing a more complete picture of Earth’s water cycle, beyond just what is observed as rainfall by weather satellites.

In addition to NASA, the EU is finally moving ahead with the long-awaited and long-delayed CryoSat 2 mission, which will launch a sophisticated satellite into orbit to precisely measure the thickness of global ice caps. The satellite will be able to measure the thickness of ice on land or floating in the sea to within one centimeter (or 0.39 inches). Thus, through repeated observations, scientists believe that this will allow them to monitor even small changes over brief periods of time. They also expect to be able to distinguish between ice melting due to warming and ice melts attributable to other reasons, such as shifting ocean currents. Thus, scientists hope that this will help them pin down the actual effects of global warming on the Earth’s ice more accurately.

Legal Intern, Jeremey Dobbins