Satellite Nobody's Talking About

As the launch date for the first in a series of new satellites to be sent up during the Trump era nears, the spacecraft is mainly being championed for its ability to predict the weather, despite its potential to provide significant insight into climate change. 

Scheduled to for launch on Nov. 10, the Joint Polar Satellite System-1 (JPSS-1) will provide meteorologists and other researchers with weather-related data such as the temperature and moisture of the atmosphere, ocean color, sea ice cover and surface temperature, and it can detect volcanic ash and fire, according to a release.  

However, the release never mentioned climate change specifically. 

“The new JPSS satellite will join GOES-16 as we are confronting one of the most tragic hurricane seasons in the past decade,” Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said in the release. “The JPSS satellite system will provide advanced forecasting on not only hurricanes but also dangerous weather events threatening communities across the United States.” 

(MORE: Volcanic Eruptions May Be Rapidly Melting Arctic Ice Sheets)

The spacecraft also has the capacity to study long-term climate trends by extending the satellite data record, which currently spans across a 30-year time period, according to a 2016 release. 

In addition to being a key tool for preparing for weather events, JPSS-1 can also perform functions such as monitoring the status of Arctic sea ice and the ozone hole hovering over Antarctica, two major indicators of global warming, Scientific American reports. It can also be used to track forest fires worsened by climate change, as well as measure plumes of smoke and carbon dioxide or methane emissions from the blazes. 

"The reason why there is so much cross-agency support and international support for these missions is because the total amount of diverse and irreplaceable data enables so much more science to be done, it's not just weather forecasts, it's not just climate, but it's all sorts of small-scale meteorology, large-scale deforestation, tracking pollution, tracking smoke fields, tracking ash where there is a volcano,"  NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies director and climatologist Gavin Schmidt said in a statement obtained by Scientific American.

"The eye that we have on the Earth system as a whole from space is without comparison; if we didn't have this our knowledge of what is going on, we would be enormously impoverished," he added

JPSS-1 is one of several satellites in the Joint Polar Satellite System that will serve as “the backbone of NOAA’s weather forecasting system for the next 20 years,” according to the release. It will orbit in the same area as Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP), a collaboration between NOAA and NASA that was launched in 2011.

Suomi NPP, which has been functioning as NOAA’s main satellite for weather observations since May 2014, will act as a bridge between the satellites and other JPSS spacecraft in NASA’s Earth Observing System.