Inside the Clouds

Reported April 2008

FORT COLLINS, Colo. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- NASA satellites are lifting the cloud of uncertainty surrounding climate change. Five satellites, flying in formation above the Earth, are revealing several times more information about global warming than traditional research methods.

"We are really just sort of beginning to discover how to combine the data -- how to unlock certain secrets that sort of exist," Graeme Stephens, Ph.D., an investigator at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo., told Ivanhoe.

At Colorado State University, meteorologists working with NASA are discovering how what happens up in the sky affects what happens down here. "What we are able to observe with this new observing system," Dr. Stephens explains. "With the radar and the laser system, in particular, we are able to unequivocally tell you how much the cloud changed."

CloudSat is just one of a constellation of five satellites orbiting earth, separated apart by only seconds. "That is an incredible kind of engineering feat to tightly fly these space crafts around the earth, maintaining this fifteen second separation within two seconds of each other," Dr. Stephens says.

Called the "A-Train" because the first satellite and last satellite in the "train" both start with the letter "A;" the A-Train's most important discovery so far? The arctic is losing cloud cover. Some meteorologists say that is contributing to global warming.

"What we've discovered is the clouds … more than half of the clouds disappeared over the arctic," Dr. Stephens says. "And what that effectively has done is like opening up the blinds, letting the sunlight, in warming the ocean surface." Sure enough, Arctic surface waters warmed four degrees last year. Meteorologists say this is only the tip of the iceberg for A-Train discoveries.

Life expectancy of the A-Train satellites is less than ten years, so scientists are trying to accumulate as much data as possible now, before any one of the satellites fails.

The American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Dr. Graeme Stephens
Colorado State University
(970) 491-8541
stephens@atmos.colostate.edu

American Geophysical Union
Washington, DC 20009-1277
1-800-966-2481
http://www.agu.org

American Meteorological Society
Boston, MA 02108-3693
(617) 227-2425
http://www.ametsoc.org

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