B and B

Earth science, Bush, and stealth budgeting maneuvers

Bush's attack on the scientists who study our planet heated up last year in a way that I completely missed. In article in the December issue of World Watch, renowned climate scientist James Hansen wrote about the stealth budget cuts dictated by the administration:

... Many people are aware that something bad happened to the NASA Earth Science budget this year, yet the severity of the cuts and their long-term implications are not universally recognized. In part this is because of a stealth budgeting maneuver.

...

When the administration announced its planned fiscal 2007 budget, NASA science was listed as having typical changes of 1 percent or so. However, Earth Science research actually had a staggering reduction of about 20 percent from the 2006 budget. How could that be accomplished? Simple enough: reduce the 2006 research budget retroactively by 20 percent! One-third of the way into fiscal year 2006, NASA Earth Science was told to go figure out how to live with a 20-percent loss of the current year's funds.

The Earth Science budget is almost a going-out-of-business budget. From the taxpayers' point of view it makes no sense. An 80-percent budget must be used mainly to support infrastructure ... . But the budget cuts wipe off the books most planned new satellite missions ..., and support for contractors, young scientists, and students disappears, with dire implications for future capabilities.

Bizarrely, this is happening just when NASA data are yielding spectacular and startling results. [Hansen then describes dramatic evidence of Arctic ice melt.]

One way to avoid bad news: stop the measurements!

As you may recall, Hansen was the scientist who helped reveal early last year how NASA administrators were trying to keep their scientists from talking openly to the media.

That didn't work out so well once the scheme became public, but now the Bushies have stepped up the fight and appear to be out to eliminate these scientists' work. We all will pay the price if they succeed.

Will America continue to be a leader in the study of our home planet?

In the spring of 2005, a panel of the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science, interrupted its designated work to warn that the system of satellites that scientists use to study how our planet works was in danger of collapse. I covered their report and its aftermath extensively at the time. (For a review, see this 2005 post and more posts here.)

Now, nearly two years later, the panel has completed its work on prioritizing future needs for Earth-observing satellites. And it has included a very similar warning.

From the New York Times today:

The nation’s ability to track retreating polar ice, shifting patterns of drought, winds and rainfall and other environmental changes is being put “at great risk” by faltering efforts to replace aging satellite-borne sensors, a panel convened by the country’s leading scientific advisory group said.

By 2010, the number of operating earth-observing instruments on NASA satellites, most of which are already past their planned lifetimes, will likely drop by 40 percent, the National Research Council of the National Academies warned in a report today.

The weakening of these monitoring efforts comes even as many scientists and the Bush administration have been stressing their growing importance, both to clarify risks from global warming and natural hazards and to track the condition of forests, fisheries, water and other resources on an increasingly crowded planet.

Several prominent scientists welcomed the report, saying that while the overall tightening of the federal budget played a role in threatening earth-observing efforts, a significant contributor was also President Bush’s recent call for NASA to focus on manned space missions.

“NASA has a mission ordering that starts with the presidential goals -- first of manned flight to Mars, and second establishing a permanent base on the moon, and then third to examine Earth, which puts Earth rather far down on the totem pole,” said F. Sherwood Rowland, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California at Irvine, who shared a Nobel prize for identifying threats to the ozone layer.

...

“This is the most critical time in human history, with the population never before so big and with stresses growing on the earth,” [co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report and the new president of the American Meteorological Society, Dr. Richard] Anthes said. “We just want to get back to the United States being a leader instead of someone you can’t count on.”

In addition to preventing a degradation in our ability to forecast such potentially devastating events, the report reiterates that a strong system of Earth-observing satellites is imperative to help address the questions that those of many of us stuck here on the planet Earth will find crucial to our future well-being. Their list of key questions includes:

• Will there be catastrophic collapse of the major ice sheets, including Greeland and West Antarctic, and, if so, how rapidly will this occur? What will be the time patterns of sea level rise as a result?
• Will droughts become more widespread in the western U.S., Australia, and Sub Saharan Africa? ... How will reduced amounts of snowfall change the needs for water storage?
• How will continuing economic development affect the production of air pollutants, and how will these pollutants be transported across oceans and continents?
• How will coastal and ocean ecosystems respond to changes in physical forcing, particularly those subject to intense human harvesting?
• Will tropical cyclones and heat waves become more frequent and more intense?

The full report is already online, and I plan to post more about this when I have the chance to examine it in more detail. But here is one ominous statement from the Executive Summary (emphasis added):

[T]here is substantial concern that substitution of passive microwave sensor data for active scatterometry data will worsen El Nino and hurricane forecasts and weather forecasts in coastal areas.

Not only failing to improve hurricane forecasts, but worsening them?  This is not a situation that, in the wake of Katrina, we be permit.

NASA's Earth science programs remain in budgetary trouble

At a congressional hearing on the budget situation for NASA's science programs last week, Dr. Berrion Moore, Director of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire, testified about the budget's effects on Earth science programs. Moore was a member of the National Academy of Science panel that last spring warned that NASA's system of Earth-observing satellites was "on the verge of collapse," so he is well-placed to provide an update on what has changed since then.

Unfortunately, as I hinted at earlier, the changes have not been for the better. I will write more on this soon, but meanwhile check out his full statement in front of the House science committee, and an article in the Houston Chronicle about the troubled situation of NASA's Earth science programs.

Details on the muzzling of NOAA scientists

The radio program, Earth and Sky, (which inexplicably is not aired in San Antonio) has an interview with MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel, published on February 16. He discusses the recent suggestions that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), parent office to the National Weather Service, has been monitoring the contact its scientists have with the public and suppressing some scientific opinions. Emanuel says:

I think there's little question that this [censorship] has been going. In the last year or so, I've had a number of colleagues in NOAA complaining about this. It takes different forms, and sometimes it's a bit subtle, but there's no question that they feel pressure to be very cautious about what they say on the issue of hurricanes and global warming. It's less clear exactly where this is coming from. We don't really know how high up in NOAA, or even if it's beyond NOAA.

Emanuel claims that the NOAA censorship problem only concerns a few scientists:

[M]y impression is that 99% of the scientific employees of NOAA have no problem at all, and are doing work that has no implications, no political implications. And they're left alone. It's just the few that are doing things that the senior management doesn't approve of that have the problems.

What problems do these chosen few have?

I think that the most egregious cases that I know about have been when scientists have been contacted by somebody in the media, maybe a major television station, and an interview was set up, and these things have to be cleared with the NOAA, with the Department of Commerce press office, and they were just nixed. They were just basically told, "no, you may not do this interview. End of story."

Who are the chosen few that "senior management doesn't approve of"? A Wall Street Journal article from February 16 actually names two:

Pieter Tans, a researcher who studies carbon dioxide at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., says public-affairs "minders" now sit in on more interviews, something that didn't happen before. He said he sees it as an attempt to control comments about the dangers of climate change.
...
Thomas Knutson, a research meteorologist with the agency's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., said he believes his views have been censored by the NOAA public-affairs office because of his view that global warming could be making hurricanes worse. Last October the public-affairs office said no to a scheduled interview with CNBC television, he said.
...
On another occasion, Dr. Knutson said he had been invited around the time of Hurricane Katrina to appear on a television show with Ron Reagan, the son of former President Reagan who is co-host of a show on MSNBC. But shortly before he was to appear, he got a voice mail from a person in public affairs. "He said, 'The White House turned it down,'" Dr. Knutson said.

Emanuel is also concerned that NOAA, late last year, officially took sides in an area of considerable scientific controversy. In response to the super-active Atlantic hurricane season, the NOAA published an article in their official magazine titled "NOAA ATTRIBUTES RECENT INCREASE IN HURRICANE ACTIVITY TO NATURALLY OCCURRING MULTI-DECADAL CLIMATE VARIABILITY. In other words, they told the public not to link all this destruction and devastation to our changing climate—it's just a natural cycle that we're currently cresting.

Yet it turns out that a significant number of scientists believe there is evidence suggesting that our warmer climate is already causing stronger hurricanes." Emanuel says:

There is the problem of an agency, like NOAA or NASA, taking a very decided stance in something that, among scientists, is controversial. I've never seen that happen before. What would have happened if back in the 1980's, NOAA had held a press conference to say that there's no such thing as an ozone hole? I mean everyone would have been shocked that they would take a position in an ongoing debate like that. And yet they have done this with hurricanes and global warming. Although I understand that they have retracted that recently, and couched it in more, in looser terms.

The Wall Street Journal article says that this retraction took place last week:

Amid a growing outcry from climate researchers in its own ranks, the [NOAA] backed away from a statement it released after last year's powerful hurricane season that discounted any link to global warming. A corrected statement, which says some NOAA researchers disagree with that view, was posted to NOAA's Web site yesterday [February 15].

The retraction appears to have taken the form of a footnote added to the end of the November article—in small print. I can't find any other reference to it in a more prominent place on NOAA's web site or amongst their press releases. The small print says:

*EDITOR’S NOTE: This consensus in this on-line magazine story represents the views of some NOAA hurricane researchers and forecasters, but does not necessarily represent the views of all NOAA scientists. It was not the intention of this article to discount the presence of a human-induced global warming element or to attempt to claim that such an element is not present. There is a robust, on-going discussion on hurricanes and climate change within NOAA and the scientific community. The headline and paragraph could have more clearly stated:

“Agreement Among Some NOAA Hurricane Researchers and Forecasters” There is agreement among a number of NOAA hurricane researchers and forecasters that recent increases in hurricane activity are primarily the result of natural fluctuations in the tropical climate system known as the tropical multi-decadal signal.”

Despite this rather weak correction, the original, misleading, headline and article still dominate on that web page, for future web surfers to stumble across. The editor's note is not even referred to until the concluding paragraphs. It can easily be missed altogether.

Emanuel, thanks to a "strong statement" issued by the head of NOAA recently, thinks the problems may be mostly in the past. I think he is way too optimistic.

NASA's administrator also issued a "strong statement" recently. But his bosses in the White House went ahead and replaced the infamous George Deutsch in the NASA press office with another scientific novice and political appointee.

It appears that the Bushies do not have any intention of stepping back from their attempts to control the flow of information out of NASA, and so the fortunes for improving the similar climate at NOAA—much further away from the public eye—do not appear promising.

The head of NOAA has not even acknowledged that there is a problem, as Emanuel points out:

Recently, the administrator of NOAA, Conrad Lautenbacher, issued a statement to his employees pretty much along those lines as well [scientific openness to the press]. Although he also denied that there was any wrong-doing, which [NASA Administrator Mike] Griffin did not do. And I think that was a mistake, because too many people know better.

Mistake? Or a calculated move? No problems means no changes are necessary.

NASA suppressed Earth science news

The NASA press office scandal rolls on, with yet more revelations about misdeeds over the last couple years.

Bush flunkies in the NASA press office have apparently been trying to suppress Earth science reports ever since the Presidential election of 2004, according to yesterday's New York Times. Apparently they must have thought that too much news on pollution and global warming—or should I use the NASA press office's preferred term of 'climate change'—might have a negative effect on their patron's political standing.

Top political appointees in the NASA press office exerted strong pressure during the 2004 presidential campaign to cut the flow of news releases on glaciers, climate, pollution and other earth sciences, public affairs officers at the agency say.

...

In a conference call with colleagues in October 2004, the colleagues said, [Gretchen Cook-Anderson, in charge of managing the flow of Earth science news at NASA headquarters] said that Glenn Mahone, then the assistant administrator for public affairs, had told her that a planned news conference on fresh readings by a new NASA satellite, Aura, that measures ozone and air pollution, should not take place until after the election.

...

[A]rchives of news releases on the NASA headquarters Web site show a sharp change in the number of such releases, to 12 in 2005 from about four dozen in 2004, a figure that had helped lead to the pressure to cut back.

Meanwhile, the Bushies have another way to cut back on the flow of Earth science news besides using their press office thugs. But we already knew about this tactic—slash its funding!

House Science Committee Chair Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) said yesterday at the hearing on NASA's budget (emphasis mine): "I am extremely uneasy about this budget, and I am in a quandary at this point about what to do about it. This budget is bad for space science, worse for earth science, perhaps worse still for aeronautics."

Committee member Mark Udall (D-Co) added:

"The situation facing the space and Earth sciences is equally troubling. More than a billion dollars was removed last year from the budgetary runout for space and Earth science that had been in the FY 2005 NASA outyear budget plan. An additional $3.1 billion is removed from the runout in this year's budget request.

So just two years after OSTP director Marburger lauded the "robust" science program that would be undertaken if the [Moon-Mars] exploration initiative were approved, we have seen more than $4 billion taken out of NASA's space and Earth science accounts."

One of the most inexplicable aspects of those cuts is NASA's plan to cut between $350 to $400 million from research and analysis funding over the next five years. As you may know, that is the funding that helps develop the next generation of scientists and engineers at our nation's universities.

Hopefully this bipartisan viewpoint in Congress will help repel the Bush forces and save NASA's Earth science programs for the future. They had some success last year. What will happen this year?

Global Precipitation Measurement mission delayed until 2012

I've only had a chance to briefly peruse the NASA budget proposal, but it didn't take long to discover at least one major negative impact on important Earth science. The launch of the Global Precipitation Measurement mission, whose data will be so important for improved understanding of hurricanes, amongst other things, has been put off a further two-and-a-half years to late 2012.

Last spring, I summarized the GPM mission in a post here. Its goals:

GPM aims to provide "near-global measurement of precipitation, its distribution, and physical processes," in order to help scientists more fully understand the details of Earth's water cycle. The total cost is approximately one billion dollars, so it is a major project. Fittingly, the data it gathers will be extremely useful in many areas of direct benefit to society. Climate scientists will be able to improve their climate models and thus improve climate prediction, which will be crucial to planning for and trying to reduce the effects of global warming in coming years. Meteorologists will be able to use this data to improve their weather models and thus improve weather forecasts. And hydrologists will be able to use data about rainfall in large drainage basins to better understand flood hazards and to enable more precise planning of activities dependent upon fresh water, which is an awful lot of activities

As I wrote in that same post, the schedule of GPM was one of the top concerns of the National Academy of Sciences panel that last year warned Congress that NASA's fleet of Earth-observing missions was at risk of collapse.

Those concerns are not likely to be allayed by news like this.

Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission will live on

Some good news on the NASA Earth science front: it looks like NASA is extending the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission.

I first learned about TRMM back in early May when I was researching a post on the future Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission. GPM will be the new-and-improved version of TRMM, measuring rainfall all over the world at approximately 3-hour intervals. TRMM, more modestly, measures rainfall throughout the tropics, and only once a day or so.

The data so provided by TRMM, though, has turned out to be amazingly useful for both research on tropical weather and climate, and also, in an area particularly relevant to the U.S. at this time of year, the tracking of hurricanes.

Alas, the TRMM satellite was due to run so low on fuel by this summer, that NASA would have to terminate the mission and save up all the remaining fuel to do a controlled reentry. After all, ever since Skylab in 1979, NASA has had an aversion to headlines about large satellites plunging through the atmosphere, potentially raining havoc on unsuspecting innocents underneath.

No problem, though. TRMM, a joint American and Japanese project launched back in 1997, is a couple years past its expected lifetime, has been tremendously successful, and has an even-better successor lined up to take its place. Time to bid it adieu. It had a good life, but it's time has come.

Alas, due to budget decisions at NASA, the successor has been pushed back to a 2010 launch at the earliest. Without TRMM, that would leave at least a 5-year gap in the climatological data record, and at least 5-years worth of dangerous tropical weather occurring without forecasters having the advantage of all this great precipitation data.

Did it make sense to purposefully dump a very useful satellite in virtually perfect working order into the ocean because of a very small risk of injuries during an uncontrolled reentry?

The answer is—it's hard to say. At least according to a report from a scientific panel commissioned by NASA to look into that question late last year:

Many organizations and individuals have invested in bringing TRMM data into the operational environment [weather and hurricane forecasting] because of the unique aspects of TRMM's orbit and sensor suite. This reflects their professional judgment of the value of doing so based on their experiences of improvements in such things as accuracy of center fixes for tropical cyclones and prediction of storm intensity. Nonetheless, the effect of TRMM data on operational applications has not been widely quantified because the data record is too short for meaningful statistical analysis and no one has done control experiments wherein the TRMM data are eliminated and the analysis is rerun. Further, the socioeconomic effects on end-users of improved forecasts have not been quantified.

An earlier review by the NASA Office of Safety and Mission Assurance in 2002 also couldn't come up with an answer: Is it riskier to dump TRMM or to keep it alive as long as possible?

In the case of a TRMM uncontrolled reentry, the casualty risk of 2/10,000 events appears to fall into an intermediate, or tolerability zone, where the risk may be tolerated in return for other (public safety) benefits.

A (defendable) quantitative estimate of the benefits derived from up to five extra years of TRMM data on improvement of storm analysis, forecasting, and public safety could not be developed. As a result NASA will need to rely on subjective estimates based on expert judgment.

So detailed analysis can't answer the question. What does the "expert judgment" say? A NASA workshop in 2001 came up with this:

Most, but not all, workshop participants subjectively estimated that the risk to human life of an uncontrolled reentry would be exceeded by the risk to human life of not having TRMM data for operational [forecasting] uses.

Not unanimous, but an answer! Despite that, earlier this year, NASA was leaning the other way. Back in April, the NASA associate administrator for science was prepared to terminate TRMM's mission and start planning for the controlled reentry. Given the uncertainties, it would have been hard to argue with that decision, even if it wouldn't have been ideal. TRMM had already been extended an extra year after a previous termination announcement.

But in June, NASA's new top gun, Mike Griffin, overruled that decision, and is "coordinating" (which I read as 'trying to figure out who's going to pay the relatively small amount of money for it') the extension of TRMM's mission until 2010 or 2011. At that point, TRMM will be completely out of fuel, unable to preserve its orbit against the drag effect of the thin atmosphere 400 km up, and thus will fall back to Earth of its own volition.

But by then, GPM, the next-generation TRMM, will be ready to take over.

Hopefully no one will be hurt when TRMM comes crashing back through the atmosphere in five or six years. And hopefully many fewer will be hurt due to the better hurricane tracking that TRMM will enable in the meantime.

Glory is saved

The House Appropriations Committee apparently understands better the value of Earth science than does the current top management of NASA (via NASA Watch):

The Committee is very concerned about the reductions to NASA's science programs especially the drastic reductions to earth science programs designed to provide a better understanding of our planet.

...

To begin to address this shortcoming the Committee is providing $40,000,000 [to NASA science] above the budget request. Within the funds provided for science, $35,000,000 is included for the Glory mission, an increase of $30,000,000 above the budget request. Without this additional funding, the amount designated in the fiscal year 2006 budget request would clearly have resulted in the unraveling of Glory as an integrated mission and resulted in a certain delay in the launch of key instruments several years beyond the planned launch date. NASA's Glory program is a key Global Climate Change Research Initiative (CCRI) mission and critical to the achievement of CCRI's science goals.

So Glory is saved, at least for now.

I'd heard about the extra $40 million earlier, but didn't know exactly where that money would be going.  I am very glad to see that most of it is going to Earth science and, in particular, to the Glory mission.

I haven't written specifically about Glory yet, except for a brief mention in my op-ed for the Washington Examiner, but one of its primary goals is to study the behavior of aerosols in Earth's atmosphere.  The properties of these tiny particles are a major uncertainty in current climate models.  So un-cancelling Glory will be a major boon to research into the effects of global warming.

That still leaves Global Precipitation Measurement delayed, and at least three other missions cancelled.  But any good news on this front is quite welcome.

Ocean winds

The late-April National Research Council report on the state of NASA's Earth science program mentioned six important missions that were in dire budget straits due to NASA's misplaced emphasis on sending humans back to the dead Moon rather than learn more about our own changing planet. Earlier I've covered Global Precipitation Measurement, which aims to measure rainfall over the bulk of the planet, and the GIFTS mission, which would demonstrate new technology for more detailed and more accurate measurements of atmospheric temperature and water vapor.  Despite their great potential for directly benefitting our lives through improved weather forecasting, climate prediction, and more, the former has been delayed until 2010, while the latter has been cancelled.

Another cancelled mission is called "Ocean Vector Winds."  Its goal is simple:  to measure the speed and direction of winds over the ocean surface.  What does this data buy us?  Apparently, quite a lot:  improved weather forecasts and storm warnings; improved knowledge of air-sea interactions and ocean circulation and thus improved climate models; and the possibility of more accurate El Nino forecasts.  El Nino, as many know, is the phenomenon, driven by changes in air and ocean circulation in the equatorial Pacific, that leads to drastic disruptions of normal climate patterns every few years, with corresponding drastic disruptions to the lives of many millions of people.

As the NRC panel indicates, the combination of all these benefits would also allow for better management of global agriculture, water resources, and more.  This is one of many areas of Earth science where improving our overall knowledge will have wide-ranging benefits to great numbers of people all over the world.

Ocean surface winds can be measured from the ground, can't they?  Does this really require a satellite?  Indeed, buoys and ships can be, and have been, used to provide similar measurements.  But they cannot cover nearly enough territory to provide a global map of ocean winds.  The data they provide is helpful, but not nearly comprehensive enough to offer the same knowledge and benefits as data from a satellite that can scan all the world's oceans in a short amount of time.

Aren't there satellites that are already gathering this data for us?  Yes, there is currently one such satellite, a NASA satellite called QuikSCAT that carries a scatterometer instrument called SeaWinds.  QuickSCAT was launched in 1999 as a quick replacement for NSCAT, which had prematurely failed a couple years earlier after a short, but successful, mission.

QuikSCAT has continued NSCAT's successes, while avoiding its premature death. A forecaster from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction's Tropical Prediction Center is quoted in the NRC report saying that "without QuikSCAT they would be forecasting in the dark."  QuikSCAT not only hasn't failed, but is now three years beyond its designed lifetime.  Since it won't last forever, what comes next?

Its first followup, SeaWinds on ADEOS-II, followed the unfortunate path of NSCAT and failed in 2003 after only a few months of operation.  And now the other followup, Ocean Vector Winds, originally scheduled for launch in 2008, has been cancelled by NASA.

(Orbiting American scatterometers appear to frequently fall victim to power failures on the satellites that carried them.  The original NASA scatterometer was launched on NASA's Seasat mission in 1978.  Less than 100 days after launch, "a power failure terminated the mission." NASA didn't send another scatterometer into space until NSCAT in 1996.  Barely nine months into its mission aboard the Japanese spacecraft ADEOS-I, "a power failure terminated the mission."  Then in 2003, a SeaWinds scatterometer was launched on ADEOS-II.  You guessed it:  six months later, "a power failure terminated the mission."  Only QuickSCAT, the one mission thrown together in a hurry, has escaped this curse of the power failure.)

So what is a scatterometer anyway?  A scatterometer bounces microwaves off the ocean surface at an angle and measures how much of this radiation gets scattered back to its detectors.  The size of this "backscatter" signal is a measure of the roughness of the ocean surface on the scale of the wavelength of the radiation—in the case of these instruments, a few centimeters.

How does this give us the wind speed and direction at the ocean surface?  As the air moves across the ocean, it generates waves, typically with wavelengths on the order of centimeters—generating exactly the roughness on the ocean surface that will cause the radar backscatter that is measured by the scatterometer. 

Via the method described above, QuikSCAT can measure wind speeds from 7 to 45 miles per hour, with an accuracy of around 4 miles per hour.  By bouncing microwaves off the ocean at different angles as the satellite orbits overhead, the direction the waves are facing, and hence the wind direction, can also be derived, to an accuracy of around 20 degrees.  According to a 2004 article in Science magazine, this accuracy in speed and direction is comparable to the accuracy of buoy measurements.  Unlike buoys, though, the QuikSCAT data is averaged over regions 16 miles across.

There are complications, of course.  Rain, in particular, can contaminate the backscatter measurements, by scattering plenty of microwave radiation itself and also by roughening the ocean surface independent of any wind.  Land also spoils the data, so ocean winds within 16 miles of land cannot be reliably measured by QuikSCAT.

Looking forward to when QuikSCAT finally dies of old age, the European Space Agency plans to launch its own scatterometer, ASCAT, on its first polar-orbiting environmental satellite later this year.  ASCAT will only have about half the coverage of QuickSCAT, however, and the NRC notes that the large gap between its measurement swaths will make it difficult to use to improve weather forecasts.

Meanwhile, NASA, NOAA, and the Department of Defense teamed up to launch Windsat in 2003.  Windsat aims to measure ocean winds, but with a radiometer rather than a scatterometer.  In other words, by measuring microwave emissions coming up through the atmosphere rather than by bouncing microwaves off the ocean surface.  This is a new method, and a test case for a future instrument to be incorporated into the next generation of polar-orbiting weather satellites.  Unfortunately, according to the NRC report, "Preliminary analysis suggests that such passive systems will produce wind observations with less accuracy and with more contamination by rain and land than active scatterometers."

So, with the cancellation of the Ocean Vector Winds mission, is QuikSCAT the end of the road for American scatterometers?  Will we have to be content with a reduced capability for measuring ocean surface winds?  It sounds so esoteric when I put it that way.  Instead, perhaps I should borrow words from the NRC report and ask if will we will be content to allow a situation that "would worsen El Nino and hurricane forecasts and weather forecasts in coastal areas?"

We have a great tool available for learning more about the planet we live on.  A tool that we've already spent many years perfecting.  A tool with no comparable replacement.  Why abandon it now?

Yet more problems for NASA Earth science?

In the wake of the statement by the American Geophysical Union this week, the perilous state of NASA's Earth science program has been much more in the news than it had been since the release of the critical National Research Council report and the House science committee hearing at the end of April (see this earlier post of mine for background information). 

Today, the Denver Post has an op-ed about the state of NASA's Earth science programs by James C. Wilson, a professor of engineering at the University of Denver, who leads a group that builds instruments for atmospheric research.  As I have also tried to do over the last month, Wilson points out the importance of these programs that NASA is cutting.  But one sentence he adds gives the impression that the situation is even more critical than I imagined:

Fiscal year 2005 Earth science research funds are now six months late, and many university research groups supported by NASA science funds are collapsing.

Current year funds are six months late?  This is the first I've seen this mentioned, though of course, it is quite possible that I've overlooked something.  Is this a general problem, or restricted to certain groups, with Wilson's presumably being one of them?