Space based climate monitoring from the year twenty o’ nine (sounds more futuristic)
On Friday, December 17th, representatives from NASA and the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) held a side event to discuss several of the international collaborations existing in the field of spaced based climate observations. There is currently a so-called ‘virtual constellation’ consisting of 13 (30 in total, 13 discussed at COP15) satellites with shared responsibilities among engineers, physicists, meteorologists and climatologists from numerous nations with the purpose of recording real-time, complimentary data for use in weather forecasting and the monitoring of climate change.
Many of the locations on earth that are most sensitive to the effects of the climate change are located in countries that lack the fundamental infrastructure needed to manage functional climate change monitoring systems. Space based observation methods give the possibility to monitor many of the earth’s dynamic systems across various types of borders. In addition, space based monitoring technology makes it possible for the governments of developing countries to share in the climate monitoring process by constructing relatively inexpensive radio antennas and downloading free data analysis algorithms from the NASA homepage.
For such a ‘virtual constellation’ to function effectively, a global community must actively collect and share climate observations, thus motivating integrated multilateral approaches, as suggested by UNFCCC framework. The current priorities for this sophisticated monitoring system, as stated by NASA, are as follows:
- Observing the dynamic functionality of forest coverage and forest coverage as CO2 sinks.
- Global monitoring of greenhouse gasses.
- Data democracy and capacity building
The side event ended on a seemingly good note where the representative from JAXA stated that we currently find ourselves in a ‘good time’ for space exploration and space based climate modeling due to a high observational capacity on the international scale. 7 new satellites will be launched collaboratively by NASA and JAXA by 2012.
