Center for a New American Security

One of the research areas that we at CNAS have been exploring for the last several years is how the United States can make better use of satellites to enhance its understanding of the environment and the potential security consequences of environmental and climate change. In August 2010, for example, Christine Parthemore and I published a study exploring the decline of America’s Earth monitoring satellite capability and its implications for U.S. national security (See Blinded).

Our research has taken us to new areas of exploration, including how the United States can make better use of satellites to respond to natural disasters and provide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR). Given that climate change could portend a future that may demand increased support from the United States to conduct HA/DR missions, it behooves national security policymakers to identify what tools and techniques the United States should have to adequately respond to future disasters.

Although not linked to climate change, tsunamis are an area that has drawn our attention as of late, especially in the wake of the March 2011 disaster in Japan. With demographic trends in Asia suggesting that more people are moving to coastal communities in seismically active regions (i.e, the Pacific Ring of Fire), more people could be vulnerable to earthquake-induced tsunamis. How should the United States think about ways to enhance its tsunami early warning system that can provide forewarning to coastal residents? NOAA’s Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) program that relies on a set of floating buoys to provide accurate readouts of tsunamis is facing budget cuts.  As a result, the United States may actually be trimming back a critical capability that could be of greater demand in the future.

Could satellites offer an opportunity to enhance tsunami early warning systems that are cost effective and provide efficient notice to vulnerable communities? Potentially.  Some of the existing (and interesting) proposals are still largely in research and development, so it is unclear of their costs when brought to scale, but they could potentially make good use of satellite systems to provide better information about an earthquake’s magnitude and the potential size of any tsunami generated by the seismic event – information that is critical to improving evacuation notices and determining the extent of the evacuation zone.

On Monday, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden provided an overview briefing on NASA's fiscal year 2013 budget. As I noted earlier this week, NASA’s budget request includes $1.8 billion for the Earth sciences program, which includes crucial satellite systems that measure environmental and climate change. “With this budget we continue to refine and demonstrate technologies that will increase our nation's capabilities,” Administrator Bolden said. The budget request supports more than 80 science missions, he added, including those “that cover the vital data we need to understand our own planet.”

As I highlighted in my post on Wednesday, NASA’s budget overview states that of the 11 operating missions under the Earth Systematic Missions program, 10 systems are beyond their design life. While NASA’s budget request ensures funding to extend many of these missions, policymakers need to be prepared to make investments in next generation Earth monitoring systems that will continue to provide the United States with the information needed to understand the pace and manifestation of long-term environmental and climate change.  

Photo: Courtesy of Bill Ingalls and NASA. 

The U.S. government’s fleet of Earth monitoring satellite systems is something that is near and dear to our hearts here in the natural security program. President Obama’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2013 budget request to Congress seems to reflect the continued interest in Earth observation satellite systems, which we have argued are crucial for U.S. national security planners trying to understand the pace and manifestation of environmental and climate change.

The president’s FY 2013 NASA budget includes a $24.3 million dollar increase in Earth sciences over the FY 2012 estimate, totaling about $1.8 billion. The NASA justification notes why the Earth sciences program is important, explaining that “From space, NASA satellites can view Earth as a planet and enable its study as a complex, dynamic system with diverse components: the oceans, atmosphere, continents, ice sheets, and life itself.” Among the systems expected to be funded include the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), which will see an additional $36.7 million in funding, totaling $157.2 million. ICESat is particularly useful for taking measurements of ice sheet mass, including of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.

The Obama administration has requested funds to support the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, which is slated to continue the Landsat program that has for four decades provided information on topics from land use change to urbanization used by planners from USAID to the Defense Department. Although the Landsat Data Continuity Mission reflects a decrease in funding between FY 2012 and FY 2013, from $159.3 million to $54.7 million, the reduced funding I suspect reflects the launch of the satellite system into orbit in January 2013, with smaller operational costs thereafter.

Earlier this week, NASA announced the findings of a University of Colorado-Boulder study that used data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite to measure the ice loss of Earth’s land ice (glaciers and ice caps) between 2003 and 2010. According to a NASA news release, “One unexpected study result from GRACE was the estimated ice loss from high Asian mountain ranges like the Himalaya, the Pamir and the Tien Shan was only about 4 billion tons of ice annually.” The report added that “Some previous ground-based estimates of ice loss in these high Asian mountains have ranged up to 50 billion tons annually.” The results from the study point to the importance of Earth monitoring satellite systems for understanding environmental and climate change, particularly for national security planners trying to determine the pace of change and its sociopolitical and security implications.

Learn more about our work on Earth monitoring systems and national security planning here.

Photo: Rendering of measurements taken from NASA’s GRACE satellite system (excluding Greenland and Antarctica). Blue indicates ice mass loss, while red indicates a gain. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Colorado. 

The Defense Science Board’s new report, Trends and Implications of Climate Change for National and International Security, is getting some good traction. As I promised in my lengthy post on Tuesday, I’m continuing to mine the report to pull out the most interesting findings and recommendations.

What is interesting (and certainly a welcomed message) is the report’s recommendation to bolster U.S. civilian satellite programs that generate environmental and climate data. According to the authors, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should, “Work with the National Aeronautical and Space Administration [NASA] to conduct a renewed study of options for increasing the availability of low-cost, high-reliability launch vehicles for civil science satellites critical for climate observations.”

The recommendation comes at a time when America’s declining earth monitoring satellite capability is raising concerns that the United States is quickly approaching a capability gap that could hamper our ability to understand near- and long-term changes to the environment, including their implications for U.S. national security. In August, Christine Parthemore and I wrote in Blinded: The Decline of U.S. Earth Monitoring Capabilities and Its Consequences for National Security that “By 2016, only seven of NASA’s current 13 earth monitoring satellites are expected to be operational, leaving a crucial information gap that will hinder national security planning,” and that losing satellite-based earth monitoring capabilities will affect U.S. national security, given that DOD, USAID, the State Department and others rely on the information generated by those satellites for crucial planning purposes.

Early Friday morning, NASA successfully launched the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project – or NPP – from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The NPP is a stopgap solution to NASA’s ailing Earth monitoring satellite program. Popular Mechanics reported on the launch and what it means for bridging the U.S. climate science gap: “As NASA’s three current polar orbiters—Terra, Aqua, and Aura—near the end of their operational lifetimes, the experimental NPP satellite is thrust into the role of providing data critical to both short-term weather forecasting and long-term climate science.”

The NPP’s successful launch on Friday is a positive step forward in the still long road to developing a more robust satellite-based Earth and climate monitoring program. Christine Parthemore and I wrote about this issue in a policy brief released in August, Blinded: The Decline of U.S. Earth Monitoring Capabilities and Its Consequences for National Security. In our policy brief, we noted that the NPP’s predecessor program, the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), was symbolic of the challenges compounding this gap in Earth and climate monitoring satellites:

One recent interagency effort to close such gaps has fallen short. The National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) was designed to translate climate and environmental data (including data from extensive existing databases) into products and analysis for DOD, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). However, after long delays, cost overruns and inadequate coordination among the partners in the interagency working group, the project was split into two components (as an alternative to being cancelled completely)… 

NPP is NASA’s and NOAA’s component project; DOD is currently working on its own.

The India Space Research Organization (ISRO) successfully launched three satellites into orbit on Wednesday: ResourceSat-2 and two nano-satellites, YouthSat and X-Sat. The payloads were launched from the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle-C16, the 17th consecutive successful launch from the PSLV after it failed during its first launch in 1993.

ResourceSat-2 is the follow on mission to ResourceSat-1, an ISRO satellite launched in 2003 that was expected to have a mission life of 5-7 years. As a remote sensing satellite, ResourceSat-2 is equipped with three cameras that provide higher resolution images than its predecessor. In addition, it will carry an experimental instrument built by the Canadian based company, COMDEV, which will provide ship surveillance (including the speed and position of vessels on Earth).

The mission objective for ResourceSat-2 is nearly identical to ResourceSat-1, which focused on providing data on natural resources, including water and agricultural as well as climate studies. In explaining ResourceSat-2’s mission, ISRO Chairman K Radhakrishnan said that it will “monitor natural resources at different resolutions. It can be used to monitor snow cover, glacier changes, urban landscape and others.”

In addition, India has touted ResourceSat-2 as a satellite that will provide useful data to the international community when it begins transmitting on April 28. The Times of India reported yesterday that data from ResourceSat-2 will be shared among 15 countries. Similarly, in discussing the new satellite, R.R. Navalgund, director of the Space Applications Centre (which is a major component of ISRO) said, “You can collect data from the entire globe. So, there will be a great demand for this kind of data which is available from the Resourcesat-2…. It will become the workhorse for monitoring the resources of the entire earth for the global community.”

The Jason-1 and Jason-2 satellites were built and run by France and the United States and launched on December 7, 2001 and June 20, 2008 respectively. As the successor satellites to the TOPEX/POSEIDON mission that began in 1992, the Jason satellites were designed to study the ocean. To this end, the satellites capture images of approximately 90 percent of the non-ice ocean surface every 10 days.  

This is an important mission for understanding climate change, as the oceans are an essential component of the Earth’s climate equation. As a NASA publication on Jason-2 notes, “The ocean acts as Earth’s thermostat, storing energy from the sun and keeping Earth from heating up quickly.” This makes the ocean, “the single most important influence on Earth’s weather and climate.”

The Jason satellites monitor different aspects of the ocean. The central task of the Jason satellites is to map ocean surface topography. Ocean surface topography is defined as, “the height of the earth surface relative to Earth’s geoid (a hypothetical Earth surface that represents the mean sea level if there were no winds, currents and most tides).” To simplify, the satellites capture the height of the mountains in the ocean, as well as the depths of ocean valleys.

The Landsat program is a set of moderate resolution satellites that have been collecting images of the Earth for nearly 39 years, the longest continuous mission of its kind. It has many applications for natural security topics. Currently it is operating two satellites - Landsat-5, launched in 1984, and Landsat-7 launched in 1999 – although their continued operation remains in doubt. As a 2007 report by the Office of Science and Technology Policy concluded, “The currently functioning U.S. moderate resolution satellites (Landsat 5 and 7) are operating beyond their design lifetimes in degraded status and are subject to failure at any time.” To maintain the uninterrupted flow of moderate resolution data, the United States must ensure that the successor program, Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), gets up and running quickly.

History

Influenced by the Apollo mission, the director of U.S. Geographical Survey first proposed the idea of a remote sensing project, which became Landsat in 1965. After overcoming intense opposition from some within government, Landsat-1 was launched on July 23, 1972. At the time it was the first Earth observation satellite in orbit with the explicit purpose of studying and monitoring the planet. Originally only planned for a one year mission, the satellite operated until January 1978, providing approximately 300,000 images of the Earth. Although originally only conceived of as a five satellite program, six satellites in addition to Landsat-1 have been designed, however Landsat-6 failed during the launch and, consequently, never reached orbit.

Maintaining congressional support has remained a challenge throughout Landsat’s history. Soon after the launch of Landsat-5, Congress passed the Land Remote-Sensing Commercialization Act of 1984, which privatized the program. Under the instruction of this legislation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which had responsibility for the Landsat program, sold the rights to Landsat data to Earth Observation Satellite Company (EOSAT), a private company. The program faltered under privatization however, because there were not enough consumers of the data to provide continuous imaging. By 1989, NOAA instructed the EOSAT to turn the satellites off for good. The program was returned to government control under the first Bush administration when Congress passed the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992, repealing the 1984 law and ordering the construction of the Landsat-7 satellite.

We’ve discussed earth observation satellites a number of times on this blog in the past few weeks. Much of our focus thus far has been on the utility of these satellites in helping us understand and monitor environmental and climate change. But another one of their many uses is helping countries track and respond to natural disasters. In fact, earth observation satellites have been used in a number of capacities in responding to the recent crises in Japan.

First, a little background is in order. Immediately after the earthquake the Japanese government invoked the international charter “Space and Natural Disasters.” This charter was originally created in a joint effort by the European Space Agency and the French space agency, CNES, after the UNISPACEIII Conference in Vienna in July 1999. It became fully operational on November 1, 2000. Its purpose is to coordinate the world’s satellite capabilities from the different space agencies and the private sector in the wake of natural disasters.

Once the government in Tokyo activated the charter, numerous satellites sprung into action. To be exact, 63 different observations were made within the first 48 hours. These were used to assess the damage, identify areas in desperate need, locate survivors and coordinate the resources for the recovery. Later satellite images were also used to monitor and respond to the nuclear crisis.  

The satellites collecting data came from both countries and the private sector. Among the countries that deployed their satellites to aid in the effort were Germany, France, the United States and even some satellites from China. Particularly remarkable was the substantial role that the private sector took on in responding to the disaster. The assistance from Geo-eye, a company headquartered out of Dulles, Virginia, was particularly remarkable. Using the Geo-eye 1 satellite, the highest-resolution commercial earth observation satellite in the world, the company captured stunning images of the damage the natural disasters had created around the Northeastern coast of Japan and the nuclear reactors. In conjunction with Google, Geo-eye used software that allowed consumers to compare pre- and post-quake images of the same area side by side. A number of news services including the New York Times and the BBC have put this service up on their websites. Other private companies that responded to the effort were Rapideye and DigitalGlobe.