With the steady progression of climate change, the rate of flooding across the globe is only expected to rise. But according to a new study from Cornell University, our first line of defense – a series of weather satellites situated hundreds of miles above the Earth’s surface – are in need of some serious overhaul.
The study, published this month on the Environmental Research Letters website, has found that these rainfall detection satellites have significant weak spots and gaps, particularly over developing countries where sudden flooding could have a devastating effect.
Leading the research effort was Patrick Reed, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell who worked in tandem with researchers from Princeton University and the Aerospace Corporation to leverage the Blue Waters supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Using Blue Waters’ capacity to process over 1.5 petabytes of data, the team found that even when all ten of the weather satellites are coordinated and working correctly, there are still areas with lesser coverage that are left at risk. What’s more, four of the 10 satellites have outlived their warranty, which could result in even more significant gaps, and greater risk for dramatic floods to go unseen in the globe’s most vulnerable areas.
However, with additional simulations the researchers did find that replacing only two of the four older satellites could have a considerable effect toward bolstering worldwide coverage.
Currently, the use of the satellites is disjointed, with administration of the units shifting between the domains of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Defense, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the European Space Agency, and others. As a result, the paper calls for an international effort to come together and replace these key satellites.
But this isn’t the first call to action that the satellite operators have heard. The National Research Council voiced concerns about the potential to lose satellite capabilities in 2007 and again in 2012 to no avail. Reed and his researchers’ aim is to bootstrap the effort by outlining in greater detail the consequences of leaving the satellites and their management unchanged.
Moving forward, the team is looking at other water management systems, such as ground-based sensors and hydrologic modeling, that could better manage flood and drought conditions.