We wouldn't be able to understand the climate system and climate change without satellites.
A NASA satellite detected the receding ozone layer over the south pole in 1987.
Meteorologists rely on satellite data to track climate patterns.
And under the Biden administration, NASA has missions to learn more about climate change.
Space exploration is essential for understanding the Earth and its climate.
Satellites in space tell us the climate story of the planet.
They tell us how we're warming, some about why we're warming,
where the climate system may be going.
When I think about everything that I've learned about climate change,
so much of it comes from space-based sources, and so much more is going
to come from space-based sources.
President Biden's 2022 budget includes a lot more funding
for planetary science compared to last year.
And it's going to give NASA a lot of room to explore climate change.
At the same time, private companies are driving down the cost of launching satellites.
It's becoming cheaper to get stuff into space
because we have all these private sector companies that are competing with each other
to charge NASA or to charge private firms to carry their payload into space.
There are all sorts of questions that scientists have about how the Earth works
that they can possibly answer through new satellite capabilities.
Like tracking how quickly ice sheets are melting on the poles.
Monitoring how coral reefs are surviving underwater.
And questions about aerosols in the atmosphere.
Scientists have been trying to get a better handle on how aerosol particles
such as sulfate aerosols, aerosols that come out of the ocean during storms, aerosols that come
from dust or other sources, really how they're gonna change
and how they're already affecting the climate.
Plus, it could also help track emissions with greater accuracy.
If we can monitor from space how much greenhouse gases China is emitting,
India is emitting, Brazil is emitting, United States is emitting,
maybe it actually helps us know that there is tracking and enforcement.
When I talk to scientists, there's no illusions that they're going to get an answer
and then suddenly climate change is going to disappear.
It's more a matter of trying to fine tune the computer models and projections.
Satellites won't 'solve climate change' But, they'll help us learn more about exactly what
to expect from it, making it easier to track emissions
and determine the best ways to address climate change.
I think that we're going to see this more and more being used by the financial sector,
being used by journalism organizations, being used by environmental groups
to track different things that they're concerned about.
This is an incredibly exciting moment in Earth sensing satellites
and in climate sensing satellites, in particular.
However, it's also a sobering moment because we're observing what we're doing
to the planet and how that's changing things.
Here's what we've covered: More information about space is going
to impact how we understand the climate on Earth.
It could help us understand precisely how global warming is changing.
And that could influence how climate change policy and research develop in the future.
The future of everybody's life on this planet right now is affected by the climate,
and we would not have critical information about how that's going to evolve,
unless we have a full array of instruments to show us that picture.