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CONTINUITY OF NASA EARTH OBSERVATIONS FROM SPACE
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NASA’s Earth Science Division (ESD) conducts a wide range of satellite and suborbital missions to observe Earth’s land surface and interior, biosphere, atmosphere, cryosphere, and oceans as part of a program to improve understanding of Earth as an integrated system. Earth observations provide the foundation for critical scientific advances, and environmental data products derived from these observations are used in resource management and for an extraordinary range of societal applications, including weather forecasts, climate projections, sea level change, water management, disease early warning, agricultural production, and the response to natural disasters. As the complexity of societal infrastructure and its vulnerability to environmental disruption increases, the demands for deeper scientific insights and more actionable information continue to rise. To serve these demands, NASA’s ESD is challenged with optimizing the partitioning of its finite resources among measurements intended for exploring new science frontiers, carefully characterizing long-term changes in the Earth system, and supporting ongoing societal applications. This challenge is most acute in the decisions the division makes between sup- porting measurement continuity of data streams that are critical components of Earth science research programs (including, but not limited, to climate-related measurements) and the development of new measurement capabilities. While the distinction between measurements oriented toward “research” and “applications” is somewhat artificial (both types of measurements are typically needed in support of a particular societal application, and both research and application objectives may require continuous or sustained measurements), their requirements are not consistent. In particular, while many applications are associated with a requirement for near real-time data avail- ability, climate change science objectives typically require accurate measurements and long, stable, uninterrupted time-series. Further, within the class of measurements with a science/research focus, the need for new measurements to enable Earth System process studies contrasts with the need to continue well-understood measurements related to key climate change indicators.
978-0-309-37743-0
NONE
Management
English
2013
1-119
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