A new cooperative institute involving government and university researchers will use satellite observations to detect, monitor and forecast climate change and its impact on the environment.
Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, have teamed up with experts from the University of Maryland and North Carolina State University to form the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, the NOAA announced last week.
In addition to studying data from satellites currently in operation,
scientists will also extract climate data from two next generation
satellite systems–the Geostationary Operational Environmental
Satellite-R series, or GOES-R, and the National Polar-orbiting
Operational Environmental Satellite System, or NPOESS.
“To help us understand climate change, we have to find ways to best leverage all of our available resources, including the information we get from satellites,” said Mary Kicza, assistant administrator for NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service. “Bringing together some of the best minds to study satellite imagery and data will shed more light on how our climate is changing.”
The institute will have two centers–one in College Park, Md., adjacent to the site of the planned NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, and the other at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
"Establishing this Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites is a major step forward in the NOAA-led effort to create a National Climate Service that would provide longer-term forecasts and warnings related to climate change, just as the National Weather Service does for storms and other short term weather changes," said University of Maryland climate scientist Phillip Arkin, who will serve as director of the institute.
Other partners of the institute include: Howard University, Princeton University, Duke University, the University of California at Irvine, Columbia University, the University of Miami, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Oregon State University, Colorado State University, Remote Sensing Systems, in Santa Rosa, Calif., and the City University of New York.
"This is an excellent step towards observing and documenting climate
impacts on national and regional scales, and a wonderful partnership
between government and academia that will be a major player in climate
research," says Dr. Otis Brown, who will direct the institute for North
Carolina State.
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