A Mission to Better Understand Earth’s Polar Regions (Mission Overview)
NASA’s PREFIRE mission aims to improve global climate change predictions by expanding our understanding of heat loss at the polar regions. The Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment (PREFIRE) will send two shoebox-size satellites into space to study the Arctic and Antarctic. They’ll be the first to systematically measure heat in the form of far-infrared radiation emitted from those regions.
Earth absorbs much of the Sun’s energy at the tropics. Weather and ocean currents then move that heat toward the poles, which help regulate Earth’s climate by radiating that heat back into space. But the Arctic is warming about three times faster than anywhere else on Earth, and that’s leading to increased ice sheet melt and sea level rise in coastal communities. The data from PREFIRE will help scientists better understand how Earth’s polar regions respond to climate change and what that might mean for the future.
For more information: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/prefire
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Wisconsin
Transcript
[Ice cracking, splash]
[Tristan L’Ecuyer] The Arctic is warming three times faster than anywhere else on Earth.
[Natasha Vos] This is a huge problem, in part because that is enhancing melt of the ice sheet. It's leading to enhance melt of sea ice.
[Tristan L’Ecuyer] All of the coastal communities around the world are now seeing sea level rise around them, and experiencing increased flooding.
[Sharmila Padmanabhan] It will impact the future generations. They're going to inherit a planet that's going to be many degrees warmer than what we are today.
[Tristan L’Ecuyer] We need to have better predictions of how sea level will change, how the weather around the planet is going to change. The only way we're going to do that is to understand how the polar regions are responding to climate change.
[Natasha Vos] We have this considerable knowledge gap in our understanding of Arctic climate.
[Tristan L’Ecuyer] PREFIRE is going to fill this important gap.
[Sharmila Padmanabhan] PREFIRE. Polar.
[Tristan L’Ecuyer] Radiant.
[Natasha Vos] Energy.
[Sharmila Padmanabhan] In the far
[Tristan L’Ecuyer] Infrared
[Natasha Vos] Experiment.
[Tristan L’Ecuyer] So Earth's temperature is set by a balance between the amount of energy the Earth receives from the sun and the amount of energy that it emits back to space.
[Natasha Vos] Most of the energy that is radiated to space from our polar regions is far infrared energy. And we have no modern satellite observations of this incredibly important energy spectrum.
[Natasha Vos] PREFIRE will be deploying two CubeSats. Over the course of a year, they're going to be measuring the far infrared energy for the very first time that is leaving the top of our atmosphere.
[Tristan L’Ecuyer] Each of our PREFIRE CubeSats carry something called a thermal infrared spectrometer. That looks down at the earth and gathers energy being emitted from the planet at different wavelengths.
[Sharmila Padmanabhan] Just imagine a rainbow. When you see a rainbow, you see the different colors in the rainbow. And what happens is, is light gets dispersed. Similarly, we see the different wavelengths split up and you can measure each of these wavelengths and that's what the spectrometer does. It spectrally separates the radiation into different wave lengths.
[Tristan L’Ecuyer] These wavelengths are going to give us really important information about how the surface is changing in the polar regions, whether that's going from an ice covered surface to a melted surface, or whether it's going from sea ice to open ocean.
[Sharmila Padmanabhan] The two satellites are going to be orbiting in a polar orbit around the earth. The first satellite comes along and measures the scene over the poles. And then a few hours later, we have the second one comes along. You know, different orbit and measure the same scene. So you understand the impact of how the energy changes in those few hours.
[Tristan L’Ecuyer] It's really important that we understand how much energy is being emitted by the polar regions, because that defines how cold the polar regions get. And that temperature difference between the warm tropics and the cold polar regions is actually what drives the entire weather system around the planet.
[Natasha Vos] What we want to do with pre fire is we want to take these new observations that have never been made before and we want to improve understanding of the climate system and our understanding of how climate is going to be changing.
[Sharmila Padmanabhan] Understanding how sea level rises and how the ice melts is going to help us understand weather events. And that's going to have a direct impact on our farmers and agriculture.
[Tristan L’Ecuyer] There's a real urgency to getting this information now. Things are changing so quickly in the Arctic that we may only have 5 to 10 years to respond to those changes and help protect the property and lives that may be affected by that.
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