53 minutes ago
Jonathan Amos,Science correspondent, @BBCAmos
A sophisticated joint European-Japanese satellite has launched to measure how clouds influence the climate.
Some low-level clouds are known to cool the planet, others at high altitude will act as a blanket.
The Earthcare mission will use a laser and a radar to probe the atmosphere to see precisely where the balance lies.
It’s one of the great uncertainties in the computer models used to forecast how the climate will respond to increasing levels of greenhouse gases.
“Many of our models suggest cloud cover will go down in the future and that means that clouds will reflect less sunlight back to space, more will be absorbed at the surface and that will act as an amplifier to the warming we would get from carbon dioxide,” Dr Robin Hogan, from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, told BBC News.
The 2.3-tonne satellite was sent up from California on a SpaceX rocket.
The project is led by the European Space Agency (Esa), which has described it as the organisation’s most complex Earth observation venture to date.
Certainly, the technical challenge in getting the instruments to work as intended has been immense. It’s taken fully 20 years to go from mission approval to launch.
Earthcare will circle the Earth at a height of about 400km (250 miles).
It’s actually got four instruments in total that will work in unison to get at the information sought by climate scientists.
The simplest is an imager – a camera that will take pictures of the scene passing below the spacecraft
The post Satellite to probe mystery of clouds and climate first appeared on EnviroLink Network.