The nation’s ability to track retreating polar ice, shifting patterns of drought, winds and rainfall and other environmental changes is being put “at great risk” by faltering efforts to replace aging satellite-borne sensors, a panel convened by the country’s leading scientific advisory group said.
By 2010, the number of operating earth-observing instruments on NASA satellites, most of which are already past their planned lifetimes, will likely drop by 40 percent, the National Research Council of the National Academies warned in a report today.
The weakening of these monitoring efforts comes even as many scientists and the Bush administration have been stressing their growing importance, both to clarify risks from global warming and natural hazards and to track the condition of forests, fisheries, water and other resources on an increasingly crowded planet.
Several prominent scientists welcomed the report, saying that while the overall tightening of the federal budget played a role in threatening earth-observing efforts, a significant contributor was also President Bush’s recent call for NASA to focus on manned space missions.
“NASA has a mission ordering that starts with the presidential goals -- first of manned flight to Mars, and second establishing a permanent base on the moon, and then third to examine Earth, which puts Earth rather far down on the totem pole,” said F. Sherwood Rowland, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California at Irvine, who shared a Nobel prize for identifying threats to the ozone layer.
In an e-mailed statement, John H. Marburger III, President Bush’s science adviser and director of the White House’s science and technology policy office, acknowledged there were many challenges to maintaining and improving earth-observing systems, but said the administration was committed to keeping them a “top science priority.”
The report, “Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond,” proposed spending roughly $7.5 billion on new instruments and satellite missions through 2020 that would satisfy various scientific and societal priorities while holding annual costs around what they were, as a percentage of the economy, in 2000.
“We’re trying to present a balanced, affordable program that spans all the earth sciences,” said Richard A. Anthes, the co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report and the new president of the American Meteorological Society.
The report is the latest in a string of findings from such panels pointing to dangers from recent disinvestment in long-term monitoring of a fast-changing planet.
“This is the most critical time in human history, with the population never before so big and with stresses growing on the earth,” Dr. Anthes said. “We just want to get back to the United States being a leader instead of someone you can’t count on.”
Satellite-borne instruments, using radars, lasers, and other means, have revolutionized earth and climate science, allowing researchers to accurately and efficiently track parameters like sea level, fields of winds across the oceans, tiny motions of the earth from earthquakes, the amount of rain in a cyclone and moisture in air, and the average temperature of various layers of the atmosphere.
The committee identified significant gaps in instrumentation or plans for satellites orbiting over the poles, around the equator, and positioned so that they remain stationary over spots on the rotating earth.
One of the most important aspects of such monitoring is having new satellites built and launched before old ones fail.
Without overlapping streams of data, it is hard to assemble meaningful long-term records that are sufficiently precise to reveal some new, potentially dangerous, trend amid the naturally variable conditions in oceans and the atmosphere, the report’s authors said.
The report went beyond discussing ailing hardware and said that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy should do more to insure that society and science were benefiting fully from the reams of data flowing from orbiting instruments.
Typically, the satellites and sensors are developed and launched by the space agency and then, once they have proved useful in weather forecasting, climate research, and the like, are operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA.
That kind of handoff has caused many programs to falter, the report said.
“There’s a bias toward the new thing,” Dr. Anthes said. “NASA is a research and technology organization. Once they’ve demonstrated the technology, there’s not much interest in keeping doing it.”
Senior officials at NASA and NOAA welcomed the report and said its findings would be weighed as they sought ways to sustain earth observations in a time of tight budgets.
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