How New Climate Satellite Missions Aim to Bridge the Gap Between Data and Decisions

The urgent response to the climate crisis is now. With Earth facing threats from global warming, air pollution, and the decrease in ocean biodiversity, satellite initiatives that use Earth's vantage point from space provide critical data to illuminate the impacts of climate change and extend this knowledge worldwide.

These satellites can interpret the impact of climate change in different ways and enhance the public's understanding. However, acquiring this data is only the first step and many active missions are grappling with the challenge of how to make an impact once the data is out the door.

Three recently launched missions — MethaneSAT, Muon Space, and NASA’s PACE satellite — employ different technologies for environmental monitoring to show real-time reactions in the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere, and are taking different approaches to bridge the gap between data collection and real-world impact.

MethaneSAT is an initiative by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a global nonprofit organization tackling climate change. The new satellite, launched into orbit on March 4, is leading the charge in collecting methane emission data. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas with over 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide, and the EDF cites that the fastest way to slow global warming is to slash methane pollution. MethaneSAT will measure methane pollution from oil and gas facilities worldwide.

MethaneSAT’s primary goal is to reduce harmful methane emissions from the oil and gas industry by 75 percent by 2030. The mission uses satellite remote sensing technology to track total emissions in a basin or sub-basin, map emissions across the basin, and pinpoint superemitter point sources and where those emissions are coming from.

EDF Chief Scientist Steven Hamburg says the data from MethaneSAT will bring about “radical transparency,” and hold companies accountable.

“The MethaneSAT revolution is about seeing the whole picture, understanding the distribution, and having the consistent ability to compare and contrast. That's the revolution and radical transparency,” Hamburg said. “Everybody can have access to it. Everybody can see it. It's about allowing people to trust and verify.”

Hamburg said the mission aims to solve three main questions: Where are the emissions for an entire sector on a global scale? How much are those emissions distributed across that global scale? How are those emissions changing over time?

MethaneSAT aims to pinpoint where emissions are coming from and fact-check industry emissions reporting so that companies will adhere to national regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a final rule on December 2, 2023, to reduce emissions of methane and other harmful air pollution from oil and natural gas operations — including, for the first time, from existing sources nationwide.

Hamburg explains these new regulations can expose if companies are being truthful and transparent about emissions. If they do not comply, companies could be at risk of losing financial investors and public support.

There will also be pressure from international markets such as Europe, Japan, and Korea. Hamburg says if governments are pushing their natural gas suppliers to produce lower emissions, then this will have a big impact on the market — who's producing, who's selling, and how much gas costs.

The data aims to provide a sharp image of where these emissions are coming from and provide comparisons of who is successfully mitigating emissions so others can emulate it. Hamburg says this data, which will start being released in 2025, will open the floodgates to more long-term goals.

“While we continue to do the long-term things like decarbonizing, we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels as quickly as possible,” Hamburg says. “But we need to reduce our methane immediately as we're doing that. That's possible. I am very optimistic that we have tools and we will begin to understand the problem at a level we've never had before.”

Turning Imagery into Impact

Aravind Ravichandran, founder of TerraWatch Space Advisory and Insights, tracks the Earth Observation industry and consults with businesses in this space. He believes the companies that will have the biggest impact on climate change are those that have a defined goal they want to fix or those that are focused on bringing the cost of the data as low as possible, so more people can access it.

Ravichandran pointed to how the satellite industry and partners and customers are still working through issues of who pays for commercial data, and how it leads to real action.

“What [EO providers] cannot control is what this data is used for. Or is that data used to create action? We have solutions that enable visualization of emissions, but then if the company does not stop the emission, it means nothing,” Ravichandran says. “I think the action part is up to humans, organizations, companies, corporations, and governments to figure out.”

Ravichandran also raises the question of who is responsible for funding and paying for commercial data. While there is a variety of free Earth Observation data from government satellites available, the satellite industry and its customers are still determining the monetary value of commercial data.

“There are some use cases where the case for satellite data is pretty obvious. Emissions is one, but then the question comes about who would pay for it,” Ravichandran says. “Is it a public good who pays for it? Do corporations pay for it? Governments? Again, that's being figured out.”

This value is hard to determine in part because we have yet to see this data applied on a global scale. Ravichandran says when more case studies emerge from the application of this data the value will be perceived, and the public will see this change occurring.

Data Without Politics

Another mission that is working to identify the impact of climate change is the NASA Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, and Ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission. The satellite is studying Earth's microscopic universe to understand climate dynamics and the role of aerosols and clouds in Earth's climate system.

The satellite, launched in February, contains an ocean color instrument and two polar perimeters that will observe how phytoplankton communities move around and react to changes in nutrients and temperature. The instruments will also observe how the atmosphere is changing.

Jeremy Werdell, NASA’s Chief Scientist for PACE explains how aerosols such as sea spray, smoke pollen and volcanic ash reflect light and absorb radiation. These microscopic particles play a substantial role in how the atmosphere warms where the atmosphere is warming. Werdell has worked on this mission for NASA since it first became an official mission in December 2014.

By studying the distribution of phytoplankton communities and aerosols in the clouds and atmosphere scientists can determine the biological reaction to climate change. Despite being less than 1 percent of all plants and algal biomass, the microscopic community contributes to approximately half of the primary production of organic compounds on Earth.

Werdell expects there is a lot of discovery to be made with this mission and what NASA will learn from the analysis of the microscopic community.

“I just want this to be transformative,” he says. “I don't know what the endgame is, in terms of what we're going to learn because there's too much. I hope this is a contribution that the community takes on and learns something.”

NASA has already begun receiving preliminary data from the PACE satellite.

While MethaneSAT is geared toward backing up national regulations, PACE data will target local and regional governments for a gradual implementation of the data for community benefit.

As a government agency, NASA’s focus is on producing quality data versus prescribing policy solutions.

“We get the highest quality data out the door with no politics, for decision makers and people to use, because we're not a policy agency,” Werdell says. “NASA has started to push harder on having a societal application tied to observations.”

He explains that NASA has had an applications program inside of PACE since December 2019 with 30 different projects working closely with PACE and learning about how to use the data.

Werdell predicts that fishery and coastal management will be the first to adopt PACE data. He says fisheries will leverage the space vantage viewpoint to be able to select nutrient-rich areas where there are beneficial phytoplankton communities. PACE data can also show where there are toxic phytoplankton and algae blooms that can contaminate water and food supply.

“They're talking to their local governments, or their local watershed managers, or through universities or through other government agencies,” Werdell says. “That starts on a regional level where anything from fisheries management to applications that go further down the road, like tagging seals and then they have the ability to start affecting change regionally.”

Climate Change as a National Security Issue

Aside from global warming and air quality, another way scientists can identify climate is through extreme weather conditions and temperatures. Another recently launched climate satellite mission from Muon Space aims to uncover new reactive climate patterns.

Muon Space is an end-to-end space systems provider that designs, builds, and operates Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. Its new constellation consists of smallsats and sensors to monitor Earth’s climate and ecosystems. MuSAT-2, launched in March, is an extreme weather forecasting satellite.

The satellite will test new technology to support U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) weather programs, including an advanced space-qualified software-defined radio system capable of industry leading data transfer speeds.

Muon Space Chief Scientist Dan McCleese said that MuSAT-2 is the company’s first science mission. It carries an instrument that uses the reflections of GPS signals off the earth's surface for measurements of parameters like soil moisture, sea surface winds, and characteristics that include space weather.

The satellite uses GPS information to interpret the reflected signals from the surface. It can produce the navigation and pointing information through the Earth's atmosphere to the satellite directly. This aims to provide a better understanding of the vertical temperature profile of the atmosphere.

MuSAT-2 will collect data for the DoD to develop a dataset for the U.S. Air Force that aims to be distributed at the beginning of the summer to help improve weather forecasting. The satellite will track weather indicators such as soil moisture and sea surface winds.

McCleese says there are several ways the data will impact climate research.

“The data we're doing right now for the Air Force is to improve weather forecasting which is a feed into improved climate prediction,” he says. “Parameters such as soil moisture are important in that translation from the very rapid variation of weather to the longer term climate change that we're observing today.”

Muon Space is currently working for both government and commercial customers. The company is working with Earth science observations for NASA, NOAA, as well as national security objectives. McCleese also recognized the hardships that come with finding a way to enact change from the data.

“It’s very hard to chart a course to make the policy changes through government action and industrial practice improvement for better stewardship of the earth. The information gathered from space helps us not only inform what policies and practices should be made available, so that climate change is controlled, but also to monitor the extent to which those practices and policies are in fact effective,” McCleese says.

All of these initiatives aim to provide data that will help expand the public's knowledge of climate change. As the data bridges the gaps in knowledge the next critical change will be applying these discoveries for the benefit of our society.

Ravichandran says solution companies are going to play a huge role in how these data are combined and applied. However, he identified a lack of solutions or companies in the intermediary layer, as companies are still determining gaps in the market and what type of data needs to be merged.

Ravichandran predicts that the future of this data that drives success will be the collaboration of datasets being fused.

“We have a lot of satellite data companies now that are launching satellites over the next couple of years. We will see a lot more solution companies because we have all of that data. We need platforms to fuse all of that data, process that data together, and visualize the Insight properly for the end user,” he says.

The more data that becomes available to the government and to the public the opportunity to introduce new policies and actions to slow the impact of climate change.

EDF scientist Steve Hamburg says new missions like MethaneSAT utilize high quality data to identify immediate issues to drive change.

“We get a sharp picture. We know where the problems are, we know where people are operating better,” Hamburg says. “That's what we need, and we need it across the globe across different sectors. Then we can focus our energies in the places where we can get the maximum benefits in the near term, while we continue to do the long term things like decarbonizing.” VS

Abbey Weltman is a reporting intern for Via Satellite. She is graduating from the University of Maryland this May with a degree in journalism and business.