Earth Observation Satellites Crucial to Climate Monitoring

The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) is having their annual plenary meeting in Washington, DC this week.  As the group discusses way to strengthen information sharing and data collection, their meeting serves to highlight the importance of earth observation satellites in the process of climate monitoring.

GEO coordinates the earth observation assets of 80 countries, the European Commission, and 56 international organizations, such as the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization.  It is co-chaired by China, the European Commission, South Africa, and the United States.  The group began in 2005 and its ultimate goal is to coordinate international efforts to build a Global Earth Observation System of Systems, aka GEOSS, by 2015.  GEOSS will be a public infrastructure that would connect systems, satellites, and instruments around the world to monitor and forecast global changes.  GEOSS plans on disseminating this information for researchers, policy-makers, and people in general through the GEOPortal, a single internet gateway to GEOSS data. 

The annual plenary meeting of GEO is in Washington, DC on November 17-18, 2009, and will review monitoring and information systems, web portals, and data-sharing principles.  Many of the information systems under review involve data collected by earth observation satellites.  One example is the Forest Carbon Tracking system, which combines field observations with satellite imagery to estimate trends in the spatial extent and carbon content of the world’s forests.

GEO has made significant progress since its inception in the expansion of free and open access to data and observations.  Brazil and China first decided to distribute free satellite imagery from their joint CBERS satellite missions.  Currently, Brazil’s space agency, INPE, has distributed more than 1 million free images.  In 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey made the Landsat archive available for free.  In the future, Europe’s GMES program has announced its intention to allow open access to its data when its Sentinel satellites are launched over the next few years.

GEO’s actions since 2005 emphasize the importance of earth observation satellites and data sharing to monitor and forecast global climate change in the future.  In addition, two recent examples of data collected by earth observation satellites highlight the link between these satellites and climate monitoring.

On November 12, Brazil announced that Amazon deforestation fell to its lowest annual level in 21 years, after reaching its highest rate in 2003/2004.  Brazil measures deforestation using imagery from its CBERS satellites and the National Institute of Space Studies.  The causes of this reduced deforestation are likely the result of policy, environmental pressures, and the world-wide recession, which lowered the price for commodities grown in deforested areas. 

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites have collected data that confirms that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate.  The satellite data, combined with computer models of the ice sheet, show that Greenland has lost about 1500 gigatons (1 gigaton = 1 billion tons) of ice mass between 2000 and 2008.  Scientists, who published these results in the journal Science, say that the changing ice sheet is further evidence of the impact of global warming.

References
http://www.earthobservations.org/index.html
http://www.earthobservations.org/documents/200904_geo_info_sheets.pdf
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/group-on-earth-observations-meets-in-washington-to-strengthen-access-to-data-and-information-on-biodiversity-forest-carbon-and-other-global-issues-70289572.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN12428323
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2009/11/18/2009111800298.html

Faith Fried

Intern, CSIS Technology and Public Policy