NASA Earth Science Division initiatives aid global efforts to manage climate change

NASA’s Division Director Karen St. Germain and Alicia Carey, space formulation manager for Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, discussed new ways to provide the global scientific community and the public with data to deal with a rapidly changing climate.

The discussion, part of the Space Science Track panel at the 39th Annual Space Symposium, revolved around the urgency that undergirds NASA Earth Science Division endeavors.

Topics included a new geoscience initiative rolled out as the Earth Science to Action Strategy and the impact of the NASA Earth Science Applied Sciences Disasters program. The agency also is making a transition to a streamlined process for collaboration with commercial space industry partners to corroborate scientific research. NASA is working to rapidly share data derived from satellites through its Earth Information Center, giving the globe open-source climate science.

St. Germaine stressed the importance of accelerating the collection, exchange, and application of science gathered from space.

“Space is the vantage point that allows us to see how the whole Earth system works.” she said.

With the largest Earth science data holdings in the world,  NASA’s library may hold the key to mitigating the impacts of climate change,St. Germain said.

“One way to do that is to get more hands, more eyes, more brains on the data sooner,” she said.

For more on this subject click here: Experts: Space data can mitigate climate crisis