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After looking into space for decades, NASA is turning its technology back to Earth to study the effects of drought, fire, and climate change on the blue planet.
Scientists and state officials met last Thursday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge to discuss how satellite data, 3D imaging, and new radar and laser technologies can provide invaluable insight into the world’s rapidly changing systems.
Some said the meeting marked a fundamental change for previously isolated agencies and highlighted the need to work together to resolve the climate crisis.
“I don’t want to be too dramatic, but the truth is that this discussion is about saving our planet,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told the group of participants, which included NASA and JPL earth and space scientists, local congressional officials and California Environment Secretary Wade Crowfoot and Jared Blumenfeld.
Upcoming earth-centered missions will allow a closer look at “everything that happens to the oceans, land and atmosphere” than ever before, Nelson said. Key articles included new tools to measure snow cover and groundwater, satellites to monitor methane emissions, and remote sensing equipment to assess the impact of hazards such as forest fires, earthquakes and mudslides.
“We are facing an existential crisis on this planet,” said Crowfoot, the state’s minister for natural resources. “These challenges are intense … but there is no better place than California to do this job because we understand the severity of the threat.”
The meeting between California and federal officials was a long way from 2018, when – frustrated by the Trump administration’s efforts to sink climate research – the then administration. Jerry Brown insisted that California “would launch our own damn satellite to find out where the pollution is and how we’re going to end it”.
Now, three years later, all Californians have to do is look out the window to get a feel for what scientists can observe from above. Forest fires are burning record acreage in the west, while the increasing drought is draining the region’s water supplies to unprecedented levels. The state also had its hottest summer ever in 2021.
Many attendees at the meeting hoped that the results from NASA and JPL would help combat global warming by educating decision makers as they determine the best avenues for the future.
“Having this data is really a turning point,” said NASA Assistant Administrator Pam Melroy. “Because we will never solve the climate before everyone is a participant.”
Many of the projects have been in development for years, but a recent letter of intent between the state and JPL has helped kick-start additional projects, Crowfoot said – including critical points focused on water resistance. The western United States has seen drought conditions so severe in recent months that officials shut down the Lake Oroville hydropower plant for the first time and, among other things, declared the first water shortage on the Colorado River.
A new web-based platform, OpenET, will provide satellite information on evapotranspiration, the process by which water leaves plants, soil and other surfaces, which could help state officials understand water use in agricultural areas and assist farmers with precision irrigation.
“Like the states, we are doing our best to manage this water resource, but without a partner like NASA we will never do it with the necessary sophistication,” said Crowfoot, adding that the agency could be “the top of the world.” Speer “when it comes to the fight against climate change.
Other water-related elements include surface water and ocean topography tools known as SWOT, which will contribute to NASA’s first global survey of Earth’s surface water. Every 21 days, SWOT will examine nearly 600,000 miles of global rivers at least twice, helping drought forecasters and dangerous flood preparations, officials said. It is scheduled to hit the market in 2022.
Larry James, interim director of JPL, said the next generation of water-measuring spacecraft will also allow scientists to measure freshwater body heights and currents for the first time, while laser imaging spectrometers will help study snowmelt and snow volume.
But scientists don’t just study water. Methane was also at the center of the discussion, with a new satellite slated to launch in 2023 that will help monitor levels of harmful emissions, the second largest contributor to greenhouse warming after carbon dioxide.
California Environment Secretary Blumenfeld said the state’s top three methane producers are the oil and gas industry, landfills, and agriculture (especially large animal farms and dairies). With the new tool, everyone can see whether methane is leaking in an oil refinery, for example.
“There is accountability, which is a critical element that we need to achieve in order to deal with the climate crisis, and it would not happen without NASA and JPL,” said Blumenfeld. “Globally, and living in California is a really big deal.”
But space missions are also being scrutinized because of their own environmental impact, as the fuels needed to launch rockets into space can emit carbon dioxide, liquid hydrogen, kerosene or other chemicals into the atmosphere.
The launch of a Falcon Heavy rocket from SpaceX, Elon Musk’s private space company, burned about 400 tons of kerosene in just a few minutes and emitted more carbon dioxide than the average car in more than two centuries, as reported in reports – and the number of commercial space travel is expected to increase tenfold in the coming years.
But NASA administrators say their projects are getting “smaller and smarter” in scope, with an official finding that the methane satellite is “the size of a shoebox”.
“It’s an absolutely tiny part, but it’s a real problem,” Melroy said of missile emissions, noting that the agency was working on developing more sustainable fuels.
And while many of the new tools provide a comprehensive overview of the massive global challenges, some are much more local. Nelson said people don’t have to be scientists to understand the effects of a forest fire, drought, sinkhole, or flood.
“There are places in the country that are represented in the government halls that will be very resilient, so we have to tell the story,” he said. “We have to educate people, and unfortunately all these disasters are increasingly helping us.”
Almost 2.5 million acres have been burned in California so far this year – a number just after 2020, the state’s worst wildfire season on record. Whole cities were razed to the ground by flames.
Some of NASA’s tools can help identify where wildfires can be seen or embers spurting out that could potentially endanger firefighters and ignite new flames, officials said. Others can deploy sophisticated radar systems over disaster areas to assess damage and assist first responders.
Jim Graf, director of geosciences and technology at JPL, said they can also fly over the 1,100-mile-long levee system in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to quickly identify subsidence or weak spots. This information could help officials make decisions about critical infrastructure such as roads, bridges and aqueducts.
Officials also showed their NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite, or NISAR, on Thursday, which is still under construction and will “provide an unprecedented view of Earth” when launched in 2023, they said. The satellite will monitor the entire globe while looking for disruptions in glaciers, volcanoes, and other systems.
“Basically, two radar instruments are used to study changes in the earth’s surface,” said Susan Owen McCollum, associate project scientist at NISAR. “That can tell you a lot: how fast the ice sheets are melting, how fast the ground is moving.”
Another aspect of the radar will allow officials to monitor how forest biomass is changing from carbon containment or other processes, McCollum said, which could be essential for investigating places like the Amazon.
“Radar is a very powerful imaging tool – it sees Earth in a very different way,” she said.
But NASA and JPL haven’t lost sight of the final frontier either, and officials offered a tour of the control room of the Mars Perseverance rover on Thursday. The rover, which landed on Mars in February, is collecting rock samples that will be brought back to Earth for closer examination.
The Ingenuity helicopter that arrived on the rover has also made more than a dozen flights, they said, demonstrating for the first time that motorized, controlled flight is possible on another planet.
But while the challenges of space exploration may seem a long way from those here on Earth, said Ken Farley, scientist with the Perseverance project, there is much to be learned from the red planet. Some of the rocks his team is studying are 3.5 billion years old and date from a time when liquid water flowed on the surface of Mars.
There is no liquid water on the surface of Mars today, he said, and there is practically no atmosphere.
“It’s an example of massive climate change – from a planet that we believe would have been habitable to one that is, at least on the surface, not habitable,” Farley said. “It’s a clear example of the climate changing, and it can change tremendously.”
Nelson, the NASA administrator, echoed these feelings when approaching the rover’s control team.
“This is one of the profound things that I think happens to anyone who has the privilege of looking out the window of a spaceship when orbiting the earth,” he said. “You see how beautiful it is, but how fragile.”
New NASA Earth System Observatory aims to help tackle and mitigate climate change
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