THE WASHINGTON FOREIGN PRESS CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.
MODERATOR: Okay. Well, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Washington Foreign Press Center’s briefing on NASA’s role in climate science research. My name is Doris Robinson and I am the briefing moderator.
As a reminder, this briefing is on the record. We will post the transcript and video of the briefing later today at fpc.state.gov.
Our distinguished briefer today is Dr. Katherine Calvin, chief scientist and senior climate advisor for NASA. Dr. Calvin will start with some opening remarks and then we will open it up for questions.
With that, over to you, Dr. Calvin.
DR CALVIN: Thank you so much, Doris. So, as Doris mentioned, I am the chief scientist and senior climate advisor at NASA, and so what I’d like today – to do today is to talk a little bit about what NASA is doing with respect to climate science research. But I want to start by giving you some insight into why climate. So if you advance to the next slide.
So as many of you may know – we know this from Earth’s – observations made on and above the Earth’s surface – the planet’s climate is changing. We’re seeing increases in temperature. The animation I’m showing is showing you changes in surface temperature over time. And what we know is that 2021 was tied for the sixth-warmest year on record, and collectively the last eight years have been the warmest since modern recordkeeping began. It’s not just increases in temperature that we’re experiencing. We’re also seeing other changes in the Earth, things like declines in Arctic Sea ice, increases in sea level, and changes in extreme events like heatwaves.
So what NASA is doing with respect to climate, we have a broad portfolio of climate research. So we are the U.S. space agency that conducts end-to-end research about our home planet from observations, models in applied sciences, technology development, and much more. So – go to the next slide.
What I want to do is talk through each of those a little bit more, and so I’m going to start with observations. So this animation is of the current Earth Observing Fleet. NASA has more than two dozen satellites and instruments in orbit, including several on the International Space Station, that are continually looking at the Earth. And we can see things like vegetation, clouds and precipitation, changes in the mass of ice sheets, and much more. We’ve been making these observations for decades, so we can see not just the state of the Earth today but also how it’s changed over time.
Just as a concrete example on that, you’ll see in this animation a couple of satellites labeled Landsat. So Landsat satellites, they observe the vegetation, urban areas, snow – they look at land use and land cover, so they can see where we have trees, where there are crops, where there are urban areas. We have just celebrated our 50th anniversary of Landsat, so we have 50 years of observations of the land. And what we can see when we look through that time series and look starting from 1972 through to today is you’ll see that there are increases in urban areas – so our cities are getting bigger; we’ll see declines in forest area in some parts of the world. And those all have implications for climate, and we can help understand that through our satellite observations.
Each of the satellites and instruments we have in orbit is designed to measure something different. So we can see different aspects of the Earth and use them together to get a more complete picture of how the planet has changed over time and provide that information publicly to scientists and to the public.
We work with other agencies while we’re doing these observations. So many of the missions on this animation are NASA, but we also have collaborations with other partners either within the United States or internationally. So Landsat that I just…
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