A New NASA Satellite Will Map Earth's Rising Seas:
[Ed. note: satellite successfully launched on December 17]
Early Friday morning, NASA and its international partners plan to launch the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The joint mission, shared with the French, Canadian, and United Kingdom's space agencies, will survey about 90 percent of the water on Earth—almost everything except the poles—using cloud-penetrating radar in order to create high-resolution maps of oceans, rivers, reservoirs, and lakes.
"The key advance for SWOT is that we'll be able to simultaneously measure the extent and height of water. Adding that new dimension is critical because it allows us to think about things in terms of changes in volume over time," said Tamlin Pavelsky, a University of North Carolina researcher and the SWOT team's hydrology science lead, at a press conference earlier this week.
[...] SWOT could turn out to be a major improvement over measurements by previous satellites. "Instead of a 'pencil beam' moving along the Earth's surface from a satellite, it's a wide swath. It'll provide a lot more information, a lot more spatial resolution, and hopefully better coverage up close to the coasts," says Steve Nerem, a University of Colorado scientist who uses satellite data to study sea-level rise and is not involved with SWOT. And KaRIn's swath-mapping technology is a brand-new technique, he says. "It's never been tested from orbit before, so it's kind of an experiment. We're looking forward to the data."
[...] New satellite data is important because the future of sea-level rise, floods, and droughts may be worse than some experts previously forecast. "Within our satellite record, we've seen sea-level rise along US coastlines going up fast over the past three decades," says Ben Hamlington, a sea-level rise scientist at JPL on the SWOT science team. The rate of sea-level rise is in fact accelerating, especially on the Gulf Coast and East Coast of the United States. "The trajectory we're on is pointing us to the higher end of model projections," he says, a point he made in a study last month in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
[...] Data from these satellites has already shown that some degree of sea-level rise, extreme floods, storms, and droughts are already baked into our future. But we're not doomed to climate catastrophes, Hamlington argues, because we can use this data to fend off the most extreme projected outcomes, like those that cause rapid glacier or ice sheet melt. "Reducing emissions takes some of the higher projections of sea-level rise off the table," he says. "Since catastrophic ice sheet loss will only occur under very warm futures, if we can limit warming going forward, we can avoid worst-case scenarios."
(Score: 2) by Tokolosh on Thursday December 22, @04:05PM (2 children)
Why send up a satellite if you have already decided that sea levels are rising? If you were objective you would say the satellite is to confirm or otherwise the hypothesis that sea levels are rising.
Yesterday, new deep-sea creatures were discovered. The same day it was announced that they are "at-risk". This kind of nonsense is bad for the reputation of science.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22, @09:11PM
> Why send up a satellite if you have already decided that sea levels are rising?
Here's why (from tfs):
>>SWOT could turn out to be a major improvement over measurements by previous satellites.
Rising sea level has been measured for years, by multiple techniques. This is just about improving the measurement accuracy (and the level of detail).
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Saturday December 24, @06:46AM
This a championship-quality example of money-wasting stupidity. What's next, a satellite to count cows because they make methane?
We already know how to measure ocean level. If it's a problem, spend money to fix it or deal with it.
The result will be a bunch of scientists, who otherwise might be discovering something useful to humanity, will be taking our tax money to analyze satellite data, write papers, and recommend further reductions in our freedom.