And this is exactly why _they_ don't want NASA pointing back to Earth... And why they want them to only have enough funding for the megaprojects that redirect federal money into red states.
"There's nothing to see here! Move along!"
But really, I'm glad they managed to get this out there despite the political shenanigans. It looks like they manage their own shenanigans by providing information / assistance, while not actually doing the leg work on building it or deploying it...
It will help to eventually find the hotspots (which, if in the US, are likely businesses skirting laws for profit... Or poor monitoring by the business). In either case, we can have more information on where to act.
I see where you’re coming from, but the reality is not as stark as you have put it. The forces you point to are real, but it’s more complex because many people have seen the value in learning about Earth.
A huge reason we have a NASA Earth observing system (and not just weather satellites) is the studies that grew out of the CFC damage to the ozone layer [1]. Ground stations and aircraft and balloons turned out not to be enough to assess it, so the measurements moved to space and use spectroscopy now.
(The current fleet: https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/missions/)
This has led to comprehensive CO2 observation from space, and sea surface temperature, and many other climate-related measurements including methane. All this goes back many decades at this point. It’s not a few people who managed to launch one satellite!
[1] For short, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Observing_System#History..., but see also: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/3472
What specifically are the “political shenanigans”? Do you have any evidence/links?
I personally don’t think studying earth is really what I want out of NASA. I would expect that funding to go towards study of space. For Earth, I would view that as more the job of the EPA or some other agency, and think it’s more appropriate for them to set aside funds for a satellite or whatever they need.
But yes it’s interesting to see where there are unexpected plumes. I suspect a lot of those are in third world countries where regulations and rule of law is worse, and it may be hard to address those effectively (except by subsidizing them). Sure there are some examples in the US, but the ones in the article seem much smaller in magnitude.
Depending on who wins the election, but one party has made publicly known that they will specifically defund or worse the agencies that will report this kind of information. What other examples of political shenanigans do you need? The same party that when they were in office removed the ability of these same agencies from making these type of releases to the point that they created "rogue" social media accounts.
> I would expect that funding to go towards study of space.
Space itself is pretty dull .. it's mostly a near perfect vacuum after all.
Planets and stars, galaxies and clusters are more interesting.
How does NASA perfect the remote scanning of a planet from an orbital platform if not working out the designs close to home first?
The EPA provides ground-truthing, surface level observations across the planet, these are used to calibrate and test results from orbiting instrument packages with more challenging transfer functions ( the path from what an instrument actually produces to an interpretation of what that signal "means" ).
Funding from "Carbon Mapper, a new nonprofit organization, and its partners – the State of California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL), Planet, the University of Arizona, Arizona State University (ASU), High Tide Foundation and RMI"
From https://carbonmapper.org/articles/carbon-mapper-launches-sat...
I don't know enough about the EPA's charter to know if this would be within their realm or not. Certainly launching and managing satellites is within the purview of NASA.
Here's the interactive map with nearly 6.5k plumes detected: https://data.carbonmapper.org/#1.04/31.9/19.2
This is an unusual one: one of California's largest methane plumes (689 kg/hr) is a cheese factory,
https://data.carbonmapper.org/?details=CH4_other_250m_-120.8...
What exactly is going on there? Are they dumping some sort of nutrient waste into a, wastewater pond?
I wonder with this data, it'll push communities to do something about these plumes if they are close to their home.
Wow, Texas.
But, I'm not sure if the data is complete across the globe yet. There doesn't seem to be much data over China yet.
And even if there were data from China, there's very little that could be done about it. It's not like the US could shame the plank in their eye.
One goal is to do a fine grained global census, just to see what we are confronting:
https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/22/9617/2022/
Previously, a high quality census was done of California and it turned up a nice separation into source categories (e.g., oil/gas extraction, gas transport, dairies, landfills):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1720-3
This was very impactful and influenced legislation and further measurement.
The lead author is the CEO of the nonprofit that coordinated launch of this satellite. He’s been involved in the fundamentals of this measurement for many years, including his time as a lead system engineer at JPL.
Just because we can’t do anything about it doesn’t mean that China won’t. They haven’t been completely unresponsive to internal pressure on air pollution and armed with public data, the government might want to take action. Most countries in the world don’t have the resources to run these kinds of satellites anyway so they depend on NASA/ESA to make this kind of data available to decision makers.