Solar Storms Affirmative – 4 Week Lab [1/3]
Satellite Data K2 Solve Warming
Download 0.93 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Climate monitoring gives vital data -- necessary to solve warming. Davies 10
- This can be used to calculate whether the planet can continue to soak up so much of our annual carbon emissions and whether it will continue to do so as climate changes
- . I have a team of researchers working on those observations in the Amazon now."
Satellite Data K2 Solve WarmingClimate data from satellites can identify carbon emissions which in turn guide climate change policies Gage 10 (Deborah, entrepreneurial senior executive with a technology and information industry focus. She has expertise with business start-ups and venture financing and has demonstrated track record building value for investors. “Scientist gets climate data off NASA satellite before it dies”, July 22nd, http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/thinking-tech/scientist-gets-climate-data-off-nasa-satellite-before-it-dies/4821, BJM) ***Michael Lefsky is an assistant professor at Colorado State University An assistant professor at Colorado State University, Michael Lefsky, has combined data from three NASA satellites to produce a global map of the height of the world’s forests. Knowing how tall the forests are will help scientists figure out how much carbon the trees can capture and store and how fast they’re releasing it back into the Earth’s atmosphere. That data should in turn help guide policies on climate change. Lefsky will publish a paper on his work next month in Geophysical Research Letters. The three satellites are ICESat, Terra and Aqua. Lefsky appears to have caught ICESat before the satellite’s last laser failed in February and it was taken out of commission. On July 14, NASA flight controllers finished firing ICESat’s thrusters to lower its orbit so gravity can drag it back to Earth. About 90 percent of the satellite is expected to burn up in the atmosphere — NASA claims there’s little harm from the rest, although the U.S. Space Surveillance Network is supposed to be watching for debris. A second generation ICESat won’t be launched before 2015.(More later on what NASA plans to do in the meantime). ICESat was using a laser technology similar to radar, called lidar, to measure global topography, vegetation, the mass of ice sheets and the height of aersols and clouds. From NASA: Lidar can capture vertical slices of forest canopy height by shooting pulses of light at the ground and observing how much longer it takes for light to bounce back from the surface than from the top of the forest canopy. Since lidar can penetrate the top layer of forest canopy, it provides a detailed snapshot of the vertical structure of a forest. The data Lefsky used for his map comes from more than 250 million laser pulses from ICESat, collected over seven years. He says his alternative was counting and measuring tree trunks He filled in gaps in his data (since lidar pulses are so tiny) with data from an instrument on Terra and Aqua called MODIS which measures large-scale changes on Earth, like cloud cover and radiation, but not height. So who has the tallest trees? From NASA: The new results show that temperate conifer forests — which are extremely moist and contain massive trees such as Douglas fir, western hemlock, redwoods, and sequoias — have the tallest canopies, soaring above 131 feet. In contrast, boreal forests dominated by spruce, fir, pine, and larch had canopies typically less than 66 feet. Relatively undisturbed areas in tropical rain forests were about 82 feet tall, roughly the same height as the oak, beeches, and birches of temperate broadleaf forests common in Europe and much of the United States. One puzzle Lefsky hopes to solve, according to NASA, is what happens to 2 billion tons per year of missing carbon dioxide, considering that humans generate 7 billion tons and the oceans and atmosphere only absorb five billion tons. A senior scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab, meanwhile — Sassan Saatchi — is relying on Lefsky’s data to create forest biomass maps. In a separate mapping project reported by the San Jose Mercury News (the tie-ins are carbon and lidar), researchers will be flying up and down the West Coast shooting light pulses to create the most detailed map of the coast yet. That work is overseen by NOAA and is supposed to help determine how fast the Pacific Ocean is rising. It rose eight inches in the last century and could rise another 55 inches in this one if carbon dioxide-induced global warming isn’t slowed. Climate monitoring gives vital data -- necessary to solve warming. Davies 10 (Catriona, CNN, “NASA images used to map world's tree heights”, July 21st, http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/07/21/nasa.tree.map/, BJM) ***Michael Lefsky is an assistant professor at Colorado State University (CNN) -- Scientists hagve produced the first worldwide map showing the height of forests using data from NASA satellites. The map will help scientists work out how much carbon is locked up in forests and how quickly that carbon cycles through the eco-system and back into the atmosphere. This can be used to calculate whether the planet can continue to soak up so much of our annual carbon emissions and whether it will continue to do so as climate changes. Aside from tracking carbon, other uses of the map include producing models that predict the spread and behavior of fires, and ecological models that help biologists understand the suitability of species to specific forests. The map shows that the tallest forests are in the Pacific Northwest of North America and parts of southeast Asia. Assistant Professor Michael Lefsky, of Colorado State University, collected the data for the map from laser technology, known as LIDAR, that measures the canopy height by recording how much longer it takes for light to bounce back from the ground than the top of the canopy. He based his map on data from more than 250 million laser pulses collected during a seven-year period. Even these 250 million pulses were only able to cover 2.4 percent of the Earth's surface, so Lefsky combined the LIDAR results with information from another instrument on board the satellites that is able to cover much broader areas but without the same depth. Lefsky told CNN: "It is certainly a milestone to demonstrate that this can be done and it will be a technique we can use to go forward. There are already people using the data to do things that could never be done before. "This has given us a better understanding of the pattern of trees in the Amazon, as all previous studies had disagreed on it." The map shows the height that 90 percent of trees reach, or are taller than, within 5 square kilometers (1.9 square miles) regions -- not the maximum heights of individual trees. The tallest canopies, reaching more than 40 meters (131 feet) are temperate conifer forests. Tropical rain forests reach around 25 meters (82 feet), a similar height to the oak, beech and birch forests common in Europe and the United States. Boreal forests dominated by spruce, fir, pine and larch usually had canopies of less than 20 meters (82 feet). Humans release about 7 billion tons of carbon annually, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide, of which 3 billion tons go into the atmosphere and 2 billion tons into the oceans. The remaining 2 billion tons is suspected to be captured by forests and stored as biomass, although this has not yet been proven. Ecologists are just beginning to work out which types of forests and soils store most carbon and whether they can continue to absorb our carbon emissions. Lefsky said: "We know there's a relationship between height of trees and biomass, so we can use it to calculate biomass. "My next step is to make observations about how much of this biomass is living and how much is dead and decomposing. As it decomposes it releases its carbon dioxide again. I have a team of researchers working on those observations in the Amazon now." Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
|