SPACE
Pat McCormick believes the best way to study the Earth is from space. The codirector for the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at Virginia's Hampton University is overseeing a project that will help forecasters better predict global weather: a NASA-launched satellite carrying a laser that will map the Earth's blanket of clouds and smog. "You've got to know the global distribution of clouds and aerosols if you're going to forecast accurate patterns," says McCormick.
NASA plans to launch three such orbiting ray guns over the next several years; each will shoot pulses of light at Earth from hundreds of miles in space. The laser pulses will pierce all but the thickest storm clouds, giving scientists the first accurate global measurements of everything from the altitudes of clouds to the heights of the world's forests.
Space-based laser light detection and ranging technology (aka lidar) will most likely be a significant upgrade from the host of conventional orbiting sensors already peering down at us, which have relatively poor vertical resolution and are stymied by even thin cloud cover.
Like radar waves bounced from objects and captured by dish antennas, lidar uses optical telescopes to catch the bounce of a laser's light. This September, NASA launches the Vegetation Canopy Lidar, which will create the first global, three-dimensional maps of the Earth's forests. The ICESat lidar, scheduled for launch in July 2001, will map the surface of Earth's ice sheets. And McCormick's project, the Picasso-CENA lidar, launches in March 2003 to map Earth's multiple decks of clouds and all the particles of dust and industrial crud swirling overhead.
Within a few years, McCormick, a 30-year NASA veteran, sees a world encircled with flocks of lidars measuring everything from ozone and water vapor levels to wind speeds over the ocean. But don't worry that all those pulsing lasers overhead will make Earth look like a giant Times Square. "If you're lying on your back and a laser passes right over you," says McCormick, "you won't see a thing."
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