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May 01, 2008
NASA Satellite to Map Global Water Cycle
NASA recently announced that the Soil Moisture Active-Passive mission (SMAP) is scheduled to launch December 2012.
SMAP will use a six meter deployable mesh antenna (picture by NASA) which will gather global soil moisture and freeze/thaw data so critical for accuracy of weather forecasts and predictions of global carbon cycle and climate change.
"Soil moisture is the lynch pin of the water, energy and carbon cycles over land. It is the variable that links these three cycles through its control on evaporation and plant transpiration. Global monitoring of this variable will allow a new perspective on how these three cycles work and vary together in the Earth system," said MIT Professor Dara Entekhabi, director of the Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering in MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
"Additionally because soil moisture is a state variable that controls both water and energy fluxes at the land surface, we anticipate that assimilation of the global observations will improve the skill in numerical weather prediction, especially for events that are influenced by these fluxes at the base of the atmosphere," he said.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., is the lead NASA center for the project, with participation from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, MD, as reported by Science Daily.
Posted by Stephen Betheil at May 1, 2008 07:16 PM
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