[Vision2020] ARGO Ocean Buoys, NESDIS and NASA GRACE and TERRA Satellites, IGOS (Integrated Global Observing Strategy)

[Ted Moffett]

The global scientific community has been working for decades to improve data
collection on the global environment, which is mostly Earth's oceans,
covering 70 percent of global surface.

Advances in gathering ocean data have improved immensely with the *deployment
of over 3000 ARGO buoys from 2000-2007* ( http://www-argo.ucsd.edu/ ).

Also, satellite environmental data gathering has advanced, covering both
land (use of surface data gathering has been replaced somewhat by satellite
observations) and ocean, with *NESDIS (National Environmental Satellite Data
Information Service)* *GOES* (*Geostationary Operational Environmental
Satellites), POES, DMSP, JASON-2, JPSS, GOES-R *(
http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/SatInformation.html ).

Also, *NASA GRACE satellites* (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment:
http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/ ) using microwave interferometry have
measured ice mass loss in both Antarctica and Greenland (  http://svs.gsfc.
nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003600/a003663/ ,
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL040222.shtml , http://www.nasa
.gov/home/hqnews/2006/mar/HQ_06085_arctic_ice.html ).

NASA also deployed the *TERRA satellite* in late 1999 (
http://terra.nasa.gov/ : *This website now shows Gulf oil disaster images
from TERRA*) to assist in gathering data on *Earth's Energy Balance:* *The
Earth Observing System Terra Series* (
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/service/gallery/fact_sheets/earthsci/terra/earths_energy_balance.htm
),
which involves studying and modeling numerous climate variables,
including clouds, as the immediately preceding website describes.  The
preceding scientific presentation on *Earth's Energy Balance* with
discussion of clouds is required reading for *anthropogenic climate warming
skeptics.*

Even in the 1980s, NASA deployed the *ERBS satellites* for the *Earth
Radiation Budget Experiment (
http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/erbe/ASDerbe.html ,
http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/erbe/components2.gif ), *important in studying
the climate forcing of human CO2 emissions on the Earth's energy balance (
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm ).

There is also the *Integrated Global Observing Strategy*, to coordinate
global environmental data, with numerous contributing partners from around
the world( http://www.igospartners.org/partMEMB.htm ,
http://www.igospartners.org/meet.htm ), though any attempt to centralize
global environmental data gathering through one organization is an imposing
task, subject to the objection that maintaining numerous international
independent scientific organizations working on the same scientific data
issues and theories, with each cross checking the others, even
competitively, is likely to yield a more objective less politicized rigorous
peer review of data and theory.
------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20100517/5c8cf8f8/attachment.html