A Year in Review: New Earth Discoveries in 2024
Discover a few of most enjoyable analysis discoveries of 2023- from the results of El Niño to the rising seas alongside the Jap U.S. seaboard, exploring earth’s processes continues to offer new insights into our previous, present, and future state.
About the Research and Analysis Program
Our planet is changing on all spatial and temporal scales and studying the Earth as a complex system is essential in understanding the causes and consequences of climate change and other global environmental concerns. The purpose of NASA’s Earth Science Research and Analysis Program is to advance our scientific understanding of Earth as a system and its response to natural and human-induced changes and to improve our ability to predict climate, weather, and natural hazards. These components involve multiple, complex, and coupled processes that occur on a continuum of spatial and temporal scales and affect climate, air quality, water resources, biodiversity, and other features that allow our Earth to sustain life and society.
The Earth Science Research and Analysis Program enables advances in Earth System Science by supporting analysis of data from NASA satellites and aircraft, as well as those of our international partners, in coordination with activities of NASA’s domestic and international partners, and documents the Program’s results in the peer-reviewed literature while sharing results with the broader public. The Program enables surface-based and airborne observations of the Earth system that provide both process knowledge and information that both complements and provides calibration/validation information for NASA’s satellite programs. It also develops and applies modeling approaches that can be used for quantitative testing of hypotheses for Earth system behavior and for simulating its prior, current, and future evolution informed by observations.
The Program sponsors research pertaining to six Focus Areas: Atmospheric Composition, Weather, Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems, Water and Energy Cycle, Climate Variability and Change, and the Earth Surface and Interior. Details on the key research questions, research Programs relevant satellite and airborne missions, solicited program elements, and a broad range of interagency/international collaborations and activities corresponding to each Focus Area can be found below.
- Atmospheric Composition: The Atmospheric Composition focus space consists of analysis on the composition of Earth’s ambiance, notably of the troposphere and stratosphere, in relation to local weather forcing, atmospheric ozone and aerosols, photo voltaic results, air high quality, and floor emissions of radiatively and chemically energetic supply gases and particulates.
- Weather: Our climate system contains the dynamics of the ambiance and its interplay with the oceans and land and entails phenomena starting from native or microphysical processes lasting minutes to global-scale occasions predictable as much as two weeks prior.
- Climate Variability & Change: NASA’s position in local weather variability examine is centered round offering the worldwide scale observational information units on oceans and ice, their forcings, and the interactions with your entire Earth system.
- Water & Energy Cycle: The Water & Vitality Cycle focus space research the distribution, transport, and transformation of water and vitality inside the Earth System. Steady work contains defining international precipitation, decreasing the uncertainties of estimates of W&E finances phrases, and having a powerful concentrate on enhancing distant sensing methods for land water shops and fluxes reminiscent of soil moisture, snow, floor water, discharge, ET, in addition to water high quality parts.
- Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems: This Focus Space offers with the biking of carbon in reservoirs and ecosystems because it adjustments naturally, is modified by people, and is affected by local weather change.
- Earth Surface & Interior: NASA’s Earth Floor and Inside focus space helps analysis and evaluation of solid-Earth processes and properties from crust to core. This contains offering the area geodetic observations and merchandise foundational to many area missions.
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