Earth and Sky【15】

A new weather-monitoring satellite has been 30 years in the making, and some researchers think it's worth the wait. We'll speak with a scientist about the Aqua satellite —— on today's Earth and Sky.

　　DB: This is Earth and Sky. In May of 2002, NASA launched a state-of-the-art weather satellite called Aqua. It measures temperature and moisture in the atmosphere with highly sensitive infrared and microwave sensors, called sounders.

　　JB: Aqua circles the globe each day, and along the way it gives scientists a wealth of information about weather and climate cycles. The sounders aboard Aqua require a cooling system to keep temperatures way below freezing, close to minus 270 Celsius, or minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

　　DB: We spoke with Moustafa Chahine, a member of Aqua's science team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. He said the satellite is working in ways that weren't anticipated.

　　Moustafa Chahine: We have developed the infrared microwave sounding system to give us the best temperature, the best moisture. Now in looking at it we are finding out that we can determine the amount of carbon dioxide in our own atmosphere and how it is changing. That was never a part of what we were contemplating doing. We can measure the amount of carbon monoxide. We can measure the amount of methane in our own atmosphere. All of it is coming because of the richness of the data and because of the accuracy with which we are getting it.

　　JB: For more about the Aqua satellite, come to earthsky.org. Special thanks today to NASA's Earth Science Enterprise. We're Block and Byrd for Earth and Sky.