NASA's Earth System Observatory to Study How Climate Change Fuels Natural Disasters

Climate change has posed the world's greatest existential challenge. With the pandemic threatening many countries' medical infrastructure, world leaders have not ignored the danger that Climate Change presents. Taking note of that important statement, NASA is planning to build an Earth System Observatory. Its primary purpose is to collect data on climate change, flood prevention, forest fire suppression, and the creation of a real-time agriculture process scenario.

The observatory is a proposal from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Earth Science Decadal Survey, which was made in 2017.

Significance of NASA Earth System Observatory

For the last three decades, NASA has been providing data on the evolving existence of Earth's atmosphere. Earth System Observatory will aid NASA's current experiments by providing detailed knowledge about the Earth's climate system as well as evidence to help communities recover from natural disasters. According to reports, the Earth System Observatory will be one-of-a-kind. Each satellite complements the others to have a three-dimensional, immersive view of Earth, from its bedrock to its atmosphere.

"I've seen the firsthand impact of hurricanes made more intense and destructive by climate change, like Maria and Irma," NASA Administrator Sen. Bill Nelson on the recent development said in a statement on the space agency's website.

"The Biden-Harris Administration's response to climate change matches the magnitude of the threat; a whole government, all-hands-on-deck approach to meet this moment," he added.

NASA Earth System Observatory To Aim at Answering Uncertainties of Future

SciTechDaily said the observatory will concentrate on specific regions to better understand the uncertainties that climate change will bring in the future. It will investigate the vital effect of aerosols on global energy balance, air quality forecasting, and extreme weather prediction. The Earth System Observatory will include an evaluation of the drought condition, irrigation planning, and approach to natural disasters, in addition to the relevant quotients of weather change.

Climate change is a subjective issue that impacts every aspect of life, including food, shelter, carbon, water, nutrients, and environmental resources. Earth System Observatory has devised a strategy to collect data in its entirety to promote the quotient of sustainable living. The NASA Earth System Observatory is a project that will investigate the world's most dangerous and important events, such as ice-sheet melting, floods, landslides, volcanoes, and other natural disasters.

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ISRO will be one of NASA's first combined partners, combining two radar devices to monitor variations in the Earth's surface in fractions of an inch. This would be the observatory's first measured mission supporting the NISAR mission (NASA-ISRO synthetic aperture radar).

NASA Earth System Observatory's Mission Is Worth $300 Million to $800 Million

The upcoming missions are part of a larger initiative of the United States to "enhance climate resilience."

The current missions are based on the 2017 Earth Science Decadal Survey's recommendations.

According to SpaceNews, the survey predicted that each mission would cost between $300 million and $800 million.

Nelson, a former astronaut on the Space Shuttle Columbia and current Senator from Florida, told Axios that he agrees with the country's urgency on climate change.

Nelson went on to say that after his time as an astronaut, he became a "environmentalist."

About the fact that the project is only in the planning stages, NASA has already begun collaborating with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) spacecraft could be used as a pathfinder for the observatory by the US space agency.