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.
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