Global Warming at NASA: What Experiements Are We Conducting in Space?

NASA uses space as a vantage point to examine the Earth’s global warming.

The space agency researches solar activity, air pollution, the state of the ozone layer and changes in sea ice, land ice, sea level and the temperature of the atmosphere and oceans, according to NASA.

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“NASA’s role is to make observations of our climate that can be used by the public, policymakers and to support strategic decisions,” the space agency said.

NASA spends more than $1 billion a year doing Earth science research and has more than a dozen satellites in orbit around the planet watching the oceans, land, ice, atmosphere and biosphere.

NASA promotes its accomplishments as having included providing the first global measurements of aerosols in our atmosphere, studying the processes that regulate the abundance of ozone in the atmosphere, identifying rapid changes in the Earth’s great ice sheets and recording an increase in sea levels.

Some of NASA’s more recent research efforts regarding global warming have included:

• Its announcement last month that it had determined the cold waters of Earth’s deep oceans have not warmed measurably since 2005, leaving the mystery of why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years unsolved.
• NASA’s release this month of a visualization, created on a supercomputer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., of carbon dioxide emissions between May 2005 and June 2007. National Geographic reported that in the simulation, plumes of the greenhouse gas gush into the atmosphere from major industrial centers.
• Its announcement in September of the planned deployment on the International Space Station of the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS), a new instrument NASA said will measure the character and worldwide distribution of the tiny particles that make up haze, dust, air pollutants and smoke.

NASA quoted Colleen Hartman, its deputy center director for science at the Goddard Center, as saying: “Not only will it make critical measurements that will tell us more about the global impact of pollution, smoke and dust on Earth’s climate, it will demonstrate promising new technology and prove that inexpensive missions can make critical measurements needed by the modelers to predict future climate changes."

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