The recently releasedfirst images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed new views of the cosmos in exquisite, never-before-seen detail. Webb’s image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground – and reveals thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of the vast universe.
The image reveals the depths of the universe and is a window through time. The very faintest, smallest blips of light in these photos are images of galaxies as they existed more than 13 billion years ago, near the very beginning of time. The telescope has not only allowed us to glimpse into the past but will also help answer gaping questions from how galaxies evolved to the composition of exoplanet atmospheres.
According to NASA “Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it.”
However, while the JWST will enable us to look into the past and enlighten us about the origins of the universe, our future on this planet remains uncertain. With rising global temperatures, the past few decades have observed a marked aggregation in the propensity and intensity of extreme climatic events.
Climate change has emerged as one of the most critical problems of our age, and the solution to this problem requires a lens into the future. The developments and innovations in remote sensing technology have allowed satellites to serve as this lens and prove instrumental in helping solve climate change.
Satellite Data and Climate Change
The role of satellite data in the continuous monitoring and measuring of climate change is identical to the role of the JWST in monitoring the depths of the universe.
In fact, according to the Global Climate Observing System, more than 50% ofEssential Climate Variables, which are key indicators of the earth’s changing climate, can only be tracked via satellites.
For instance, the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s)Climate Change Initiative generates reliable and long-term data for 21Essential Climate Variables. This wide array of satellite data helps identify our vulnerability to climate change by monitoring and predicting extreme climatic events, such as floods, wildfires, droughts, heatwaves and melting of glaciers, among others.
Assessing Climate Indicators
To mitigate and manage the growing threat of extreme climatic events to various aspects of our society and businesses, data-backed climate intelligence is becoming crucial.
As most climate variables can only be monitored by space, satellites provide a wealth of valuable information to understand the drivers and impact of climate change. Currently, there are around162 satellites in orbit that are continuously monitoring various climate variables. Some of the climate variables that can be continuously monitored by satellites are as follows:
Wildfires
There has been a sharp rise in the occurrence and intensity of wildfires in recent years. As wildfires are closely associated with climate change, they tend to reinforce each other. Accordingly, as the climate crisis worsens, monitoring fires could play a huge role in minimizing risks.
Satellites in this regard have emerged as an effective monitoring tool that make it possible to observe extensive areas in real-time. Data from satellites also provide valuable insights into wildfire behaviour, such as patterns and likely courses. This along with otheressential information such as vegetation in the region, weather conditions that instigate fires, etc can help in creating maps of potential fire hotspots and even help in predicting fires.
Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions increase the heat in the atmosphere, which leads to global warming. As long as emissions continue, global temperature will also continue to rise. Thus, monitoring and mapping GHG emissions is crucial in developing strategies to reduce them. Satellite data in this regard plays a prominent role as it has the ability to pinpoint emissions.
In 2009, Japan launched the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT), the world’s first satellite to monitor greenhouse gases. Since then, several more sophisticated satellites have been launched for the same purpose. At present, the Copernicus Sentinel-5P, launched in 2018 by the European Space Agency (ESA), is known to be the most advanced pollution monitoring satellite in the world. More recently, in 2021, ESA announced their new space mission, which will be able to track human-caused GHG emissions from space.
Climate change is causing floods to become increasingly intense and frequent. Accordingly, credible data is of utmost importance as it can help in mapping and managing floods and potentially even accurately predicting them. Owing to its vantage point, satellites provide information on the global occurrence and footprint of floods in near real-time. It also helps in understanding the scale and extent of flooding. For example, researchers used NASA’s TOPEX/Poseidon satellite and ESA’s ENVISAT satellite to calculate the height and extent of flooding in various regions.
Satellite imageries are also helpful in creating predictive models that could help in tentatively forecasting floods. Here, satellites use weather patterns to calculate the tentative amount of rain each area might receive. Spatial images of the ground also enable the calculation of the water retention capacity of the ground.
In addition, NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite provides scientists with insights into the amount of moisture content in the soil. This is a key factor which helps in estimating the chances of the occurrence of floods. These crucial bits of information cumulatively help in developing flood risk maps. This further helps authorities to predict floods and be better prepared to manage them.
Satellites help monitor the 2019 Arkansas River floods. Source: NASA Landsat 8
Droughts
Climate change is causing droughts to become more frequent and severe. As the impact is far-reaching, ranging from affecting water quality, public health, economy and public infrastructure, among others, monitoring and predicting droughts has become vital in managing the crisis. Satellites can play an important role in predicting droughts. They do this by measuring radiation, which helps in accurately measuring soil moisture levels.
This provides beneficial insights into weather conditions. For example, if satellite measurements find that soil is getting increasingly wet, it may indicate that a flood is imminent.
Likewise, if it finds the moisture content in soil drying up, it could be an indicator of a potential drought. For instance, the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) on board EUMETSAT’s polar-orbiting Metop satellites measure moisture content in the soil, among other things.
Remote sensing also tracks factors such as weather patterns and wind speed which influence weather conditions such as droughts. In addition, satellites also help in assessing the impact of droughts on vegetation. The satellite-based Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (FAPAR) in this regard helps in assessing the impact of droughts.
Additionally, it is essential to monitor various surface water bodies continuously for effective and sustainable water management and preempting droughts. For instance, water levels of lakes going down may indicate the first signs of impending droughts.
Satellite image captures the shrinking of Lake Milh in Iraq over the past two decades. The red outline showcased the lake in 2000, and the blue outline showcases the lake in its current state Source: Google Earth Engine
Deforestation
Deforestation is one of the most pressing challenges we face today, as the world’s tropical rainforests were estimated in 2019 to disappear at the rate of one football pitch every six seconds. Deforestation and land degradation act as a double-edged sword as they not only rob the world of naturally occurring carbon sinks but also result in the release of the stored carbon back into the atmosphere.
The severity of this problem was highlighted in 2021 when scientists alarmingly confirmed for the first time that the Amazon rainforest emitted more carbon dioxide than it was able to absorb (close to 1 billion tonnes) primarily due to deforestation, fires, degradation, etc. As the crisis worsens, monitoring deforestation has become extremely vital.
With traditional methods such as forest guards having been found to be expensive and time-consuming, satellite data has revolutionized the monitoring of deforestation with high-resolution data.
Satellites in this regard present imageries of earth on a daily basis which help in mapping deforested areas over a period of time and in identifying hotspots.
In fact, a new study has found that satellites are helping in reducing deforestation. Earth-orbiting satellites were found helpful in bringing down deforestation by 18% over two years in 22 African countries.
The countries took the help of systems that used up-to-date satellite data to send out alerts regarding decreases in forest cover in the tropics. Similarly, the Brazilian government established a data-collection system called PRODES, which uses high-resolution data from Landsat 5 and 7 satellites to monitor and map deforestation.
Satellite data shows forest loss in the Amazon basin between 2001 to 2020. Source: ESA
What does the future hold?
Satellite data has inevitably emerged at the forefront of climate action and the climate intelligence landscape. It not only addresses the shortcomings of traditional monitoring tools such as IoT monitors, forest guards, etc., but rapid technological expansion has also enabled it to provide unique and precise solutions to various challenges.
For example, a major limitation of optical satellites was the lack of clarity due to obscurement by clouds and darkness in mountainous regions. New radars developed can surpass these limitations. New generation satellites also have enhanced optical and temporal resolutions that have improved climate modelling and have capabilities to obtain real-time details.
The expansion of technology and innovation in the field thus holds tremendous promise. New satellite missions such as Eumetsat’s second-generation polar-orbiting satellites and third-generation Meteosats are expected to have immense value in the coming years.
With several path-breaking space 2.0 systems due to be launched in the coming years, clubbed with innovations in artificial intelligence and IoT, the scope of space-based technologies in transitioning into a more sustainable future is immense.
While geospatial data has emerged as a near-perfect solution to monitoring indicators of climate change, acquiring insights from its raw form is impossible. Before satellite data can be applied to climate mitigation, it needs to be processed.
This is true for any big data and today, less than 1% of global data is analysed. However, this process of extracting relevant insights from terabytes of satellite data comes at a high cost in both expertise and computing infrastructure; a key reason this information is under-utilized for understanding environmental challenges.
Hence, organizations with strong analytical skills and computational capacity will play an important role in this regard in integrating valuable data from various sources and disseminating insights through APIs.
Innovation in this sector would be key to unlocking the true potential of satellite data and successfully solving the climate crisis. After all, the images from the JWST also, are only as good as our understanding of them.
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
