By Dave Ahearn
President Bush will add $74 million to his fiscal 2009 budget plan to help place sensors on future satellites that were removed in 2006 from the planned National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) satellites, according to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
The money will be placed in the Department of Commerce budget, in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) section, OSTP said last week.
Also, the administration seeks $103 million in fiscal 2009, and a total $910 million in fiscal 2009-13, to finance new space research on climate change, as part of the budget request for NASA, research that will be performed by seven new satellites already in planning or development.
Those funds are included in Bush’s federal budget proposal for fiscal 2009 that he is sending to Congress today for its review in coming months.
The sensors that measure climate conditions and climate changes are vital to assure continuity of data, according to OSTP. Many lawmakers on key committees in Congress have voiced concern that the government will lose its capacity to monitor global climate change because the sensors were removed from NPOESS in response to cost overruns.
Separately, Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), said yesterday that efforts to monitor Earth climate conditions also will be boosted when the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center monitors “alarming changes in the Greenland ice sheet,” using $40 million that she added to the NASA budget in the current fiscal 2008.
Mikulski chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee commerce, justice, science and related agencies subcommittee.
There are many participants in the NPOESS program: Department of Defense (DoD) plans to use NPOESS satellites for military purposes, and the Commerce Department-NOAA will use them for weather/climate observation, with NASA handling the launch/operation and some other work.
The 2006 downsizing of the NPOESS program in response to significant cost overruns led to the removal, or de-manifesting, of several planned sensors that would have sustained key, longstanding climate measurements.
Since this decision, OSTP and the Office of Management and Budget worked with NASA and NOAA to understand implications of losing the sensors for climate and ocean research activities, and to identify options for retaining the key measurement capabilities from this group of planned sensors.
As a result of these assessments and information provided in the National Research Council’s (NRC) recent Decadal Survey on Earth Sciences, the administration has concluded that the highest near-term priorities are to sustain the datasets from three key climate measurement capabilities:
- Total solar irradiance, measured by the Total Solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS).
- Earth radiation budget data (from the Clouds and Earth Radiant Energy System sensor, or CERES).
- Ozone vertical profile data (from the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite Limb sensor, or OMPS-Limb).
The TSIS and CERES measurements contribute to long-term climate records that are vital to discriminating between natural and human causes of climate change and to monitoring long-term energy shifts relating to climate change, according to OSTP.
Because these sensors require on-orbit overlap between successive satellites for proper instrument calibration, a gap in coverage between existing and new sensors would create problematic breaks in existing multi-decadal data records that in turn could harm ongoing research. The OMPS-Limb data are important for monitoring ozone structure and depletion vertically in the atmosphere, and thus to understanding the ozone recovery process and related phenomena controlled by climate change.
So the administration developed steps to preclude such data gaps by housing these three sensors on other available satellites, paid for by the $74 million for NOAA.
Specifically, a CERES instrument will be flown on the NASA NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) satellite, set to launch in 2010, while another CERES instrument will be built for the first NPOESS satellite that will launch in 2013 under current plans.
As for TSIS, the funds will support instrument development and ongoing analyses to identify a suitable satellite platform for hosting this sensor, as well as beginning the necessary integration work for this effort.
The administration also has found fiscal 2008 funds needed to execute this plan, and previously provided funding in 2007 to host the OMPS-Limb sensor on the NPP spacecraft.