U.S. Cedes to Europe Leadership Role in Monitoring Global Warming via Satellite
WASHINGTON DC, June 7, 2007 - Satnews Daily - Europe is expected to take the lead in using satellites to monitor the Earth’s climate and global warming following a Bush administration decision to greatly curtail the U.S. role due to soaring development costs for the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS).
Sources in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) said a dramatic escalation in the cost of building and launching the six planned polar orbiting NPOESS satellites that will monitor world climate and weather was the major reason for the U.S. scaling back its role. Instead, four satellites are to be launched but will only do weather forecasting, a downgrade that critics of the move are describing as a crisis. Critics also felt it ill timed considering the Bush administration’s recent rhetoric about the U.S. taking the lead role in reducing greenhouse gases.
NPOESS, which was announced in 1994, is a program to combine weather forecasting satellites operated by the DoD and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and add climate monitoring instruments. Most of the NPOESS satellites were to launch in 2008 but are now scheduled for 2013 and 2026 due to serious cost overruns involving their infrared sensors.
The cost increases initially resulted in the elimination of sensors such as those used to map the ozone. The ozone sensors have since been restored but other climate sensors are being eliminated or largely downgraded by lower-quality equipment to save money.
With the downgrading of NPOESS to weather forecasting, the U.S. will instead rely on European satellites for more sophisticated climate data. European Space Agency (ESA) satellites such as Envisat, which recently celebrated its fifth year in orbit, and MetOp-A keep watch on the environment and the effects of global warming.
Launched in 2002, Envisat is the largest Earth observation spacecraft ever built. It carries 10 sophisticated optical and radar instruments to provide continuous observation and monitoring of the Earth's land, atmosphere, oceans and ice caps.
ESA recently released the most detailed photo portrait ever of the Earth's land surface created by Envisat under a project called Globcover. The project produced a global land cover map to a resolution three times sharper than any previous satellite map. The map is available on the Internet and was taken by Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (Meris). Meris is being used to acquire images with a spatial resolution of 300 meters, with an average 150 minutes of acquisitions occurring daily.
MetOp-A is Europe’s first polar-orbit weather satellite and is to be used in conjunction with the NPOESS satellites. Launched in October 2006, MetOp-A is expected to improve Europe's meteorological observation capabilities and increase its capacity for weather forecasting and climate monitoring.
Curtailing the U.S.’ environment satellite program will create major gaps in the quality of the data gathered about the Earth from space, said the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences. Both NASA and the NOAA said the loss of climate sensors places the U.S.’ overall climate program in serious jeopardy.
In 2005, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, discovered that costs for the NPOESS satellites could reach almost $10 billion and that the program was almost a year and a half behind schedule. The Pentagon last year estimated the cost at almost $12 billion and said it was further behind schedule. The original project estimate was $6.5 billion.
