Looking back at Earth from Space
Earth Day 2019
The media is slowly building up excitement in the space industry through rocket launches and NASA announcements. Since the beginning of 2019 we’ve already had:
- A Japanese probe land on an asteroid;
- India shooting down a satellite;
- 4 SpaceX missions — notably docking with the International Space Station and testing the reusable Falcon Heavy rocket;
- NASA announcing plans to land humans back on the moon;
- China managing to broadcast images from the other side of the moon;
- The EHT group compiling the first images of the black hole
Despite all of this, the most important space mission might just be simply looking back at Earth from space. For Earth Day 2019 maybe it’s worth thinking about why.
We’ve now launched numerous satellites into orbit and have been recording our planet for over 50 years. Each of these measurements independently show that the surface temperature of the planet is growing. In particular, the changes seen by NOAA 20 highlight how the troposhere is warming whilst the stratosphere is cooling; precisely where climate models prove that the warming is due to greenhouse gases and not natural factors like solar warming or a fluctuating climate.
Satellites now monitor 3D properties of our atmosphere, not just temperature but air pressure, moisture content and infrared radiation. In March of this year, NOAA has predicted that the El Nino is steering moisture laden air towards the U.S bringing the potential for severe flooding. Hurricane Florence last year (2018) drew increased strength from the unusually high sea surface temperatures across the Atlantic, which in turn caused increased inland flooding. To add insult to injury, the flooding across large parts of North Carolina was the second-worst flooding event in U.S history. This should be an adequate early warning sign for potential future disruption.
The worst was Hurricane Harvey which dropped more than a billion tons of water on Houston Texas under similar conditions, a deluge certainly worsened by climate change.
We know all of this because of the daily reports drawn up by satellites such as NOAA 20. But how can we use these reports to determine the best means of preventing future climate disasters? I guess just as a gambler can’t predict the single roll of a dice, scientists can’t determine whether climate change definitively caused any one weather event. Science can merely quantify how events differ from natural odd’s and use this to shape protection measures. More often than not it doesn’t seem like this is enough for climate change deniers.
The satellites continually monitoring our planet might not be as flashy as the rocket launches delivered by SpaceX and co. However, they play one of the most important roles of them all. Even with the desire to explore more distant planets, Earth remains the only one we can gurantee supports life.
Monitoring the health of our home, closely and constantly, is how we learn to take care of it properly.
For someone who perhaps know’s a little more about the issues at hand:
