Observations from Space – Solution to Water Shortage?

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NASA is using the next generation of satellites to monitor changes in the world’s water supplies. Scientists say the mission will provide critical data for research tracking the effects of climate change in the planet’s melting ice caps and rising oceans. The satellite measurements will also help monitor trends in major food-producing regions where groundwater is being depleted.

The twin satellites soared to orbit on May 22 are a joint mission between NASA and Germany’s space agency, Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ). The new satellites — just like the previous pair, which were in orbit from 2002 to 2017 — will follow each other in orbit, separated by about 137 miles, sending microwave signals to each other to measure the distance between them, according to desertsun.com.

The satellites will monitor changes in Earth’s gravity field, acting as a “scale in the sky” and measuring shifts in the total amounts of water, both above and below ground. The mission is dubbed GRACE Follow-On, which stands for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment.

A newly published NASA study examined data from the previous GRACE mission and found that of the 34 “hotspots” of water change, in places from California to China, the trends in about two-thirds of those areas may be linked to climate change or human activities, such as excessive groundwater pumping in farming regions.

One of the scientists attending the launch was Isabella Velicogna, a professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, who has used data from the satellites to study the massive losses of ice in Antarctica and Greenland. “It is critical to continue the observations, to inform models, to make better projections and also to capture the full details of this major evolution of the ice sheets,” Velicogna said in an email. “In climate change studies, it is essential to collect observation on decadal timescales to truly separate natural fluctuations of the system from that caused by human-induced climate change.”