Page 134 - GIS for Science, Volume 3 Preview

A UNIQUE VANTAGE POINT
Wildfires, hurricanes, floods, drought, record-breaking heat, and scarce food and water supplies have affected vast areas of Earth in recent years. As these extreme events cause billions of dollars in damage and untold human suffering, how do the planet’s natural landscapes and interconnected ecosystems respond? To answer this question, NASA’s Earth Science Division (ESD) collects petaybytes’ worth of observations to help scientists learn more about how these events affect all aspects of life on our planet.
A fleet of NASA satellites and other observation sources give researchers around the world the opportunity to combine and use vast amounts of data once separated by specific research questions or hazard types. By integrating data sources from multiple spatial scales, NASA’s missions give researchers unprecedented insights into Earth’s systems.
Instruments on land, satellites, the International Space Station, airplanes, balloons, and ships enable data collection about Earth’s atmospheric motion and composition; land cover, land use and vegetation; ocean currents, temperatures and upper-ocean life; and ice on land and sea. Collected from the most remote areas of the planet, these datasets are freely and openly available to anyone.
NASA advocates a collaborative culture using technology that empowers the open sharing of data, information, and knowledge within the scientific community and the wider public to accelerate scientific research and understanding to benefit society.
Earth’s ecosystems constantly respond to changing climates, extreme weather conditions, and human activities. The NASA Ecological Forecasting Program promotes the use of NASA Earth observations to monitor, analyze, and forecast these changes and develop resource management strategies. In addition, the NASA Biological Diversity Program supports basic research to increasingly understand why and how biological diversity is changing.
NASA explores patterns of biological diversity on land and in water using observations from satellites, airborne and seaborne platforms, and on-site surveys. These observations help NASA understand how biological diversity affects and interacts with Earth’s dynamic system—its hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and exosphere.
These observations are well-suited for detecting such patterns, especially at the ecosystem level, but also at finer community and species levels. This research includes documenting and identifying factors that determine the distribution, abundance, movement, demographics, physical or genetic characteristics, behavior, and physiology of organisms on Earth.
NASA supports open access for open science and the development of remote sensing tools, techniques, and associated models that enable this understanding. These observations can be studied based on location: mapping, visualizing, and analyzing where these events take place and how species in that area respond. Geographic information systems (GIS) technology allow NASA data to be visualized, analyzed, and shared to a wide community of researchers, scientists, educators, government partners, NGOs, nonprofit organizations, and the public.
NASA’s global repository of current and historical data can help us better understand extreme climate events and apply that knowledge to a range of biodiversity variables. This chapter explores three major themes: wildfires, flooding and drought, and extreme heat.
Typhoon Soudelor photographed from the International Space Station on August 4, 2015, in the western Pacific. The storm produced sustained winds of more than 160 mph at the time of this photograph.
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