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NASA/ESA sea-level monitoring mission will also help improve weather forecasts

NASA's launch of the Sentinel-6, an Earth-observing satellite which will monitor sea level changes and provide atmospheric data, will help improve weather forecasting as well as climate modeling.

Posted Updated

By
Tony Rice
, NASA ambassador
RALEIGH, N.C. — NASA's launch of the Sentinel-6, an Earth-observing satellite which will monitor sea level changes and provide atmospheric data, will help improve weather forecasting as well as climate modeling. 

Sentinel-6 was jointly developed by NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The mission builds builds on the heritage of the ESA (European Space Agency) Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission as well as the heritage and legacy of the U.S.-European TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason-1, 2, and 3 series of sea level observation satellites.

Jason series provided valuable views into weather phenomena like El Niño and La Niña that stretch over thousands of miles. But was unable to measure smaller sea level variations near coastlines, which can affect ship navigation and commercial fishing.

Sentinel-6’s Advanced Microwave Radiometer (AMR-C) instrument along with Poseidon-4 radar altimeter, will provide higher resolution measurements enabling researchers to see these smaller, more complicated ocean features, especially near the coastlines.

Measurements of sea surface conditions, including wave heights will also help improve weather forecasts. Sentinel-6 will also provide measurements of atmospheric density, temperature and water content from the surface to space, using technique first used to study the atmosphere of Mars.

Measuring air temperature via GPS?

Sentinel-6 will use the signals constantly being broadcast by the 31 active global positioning system and other navigational satellites. The Global Navigation Satellite System Radio Occultation instrument (GNSS-RO) listens to those GPS signals especially as they drop below the horizon. It looks for tiny changes in the time delay of these signals as they pass through different layers of the atmosphere for information about atmospheric density, temperature and water content

The COSMIC satellites produced vertical profiles of the atmosphere by measuring the bend of GPS radio signals as they traveled through the atmosphere. (Image: Simmi Sinha, UCAR)

This will provide atmosphereic measurements where they've not been possible before, over the Pacific ocean. This is where weather forms that will move over United States days later.

Radio occultation has been used since NASA’s Mariner 4 mission in 1965 when scientists analyzed the slight delay in radio signals from the spacecraft as they passed through the thin Martian atmosphere.

Ocean-Atmosphere connections

We’ve been measuring changes in sea-level continuously from space since 1992. Other measurements from

Heat-trapping greenhouse gases are the primary cause of rising global temperatures. More than 90% of that heat is observed by the oceans. Like anything else, seawater expands as it get warmer causing sea levels to rise.

Warmer water and air temperatures melts as well as breaks off portions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. NASA’s twin GRACE satellites observed both ice sheets as well as glaciers globally shrinking over its 15 year mission.

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