Rising Ocean Levels To Be Monitored By New Satellites

Global warming and climate change are real. The rising sea levels have severely impacted life. Now, there are new satellites that can indicate how fast the oceans are rising. In a joint mission between the European countries and the US, a couple of satellites are being launched to monitor the rising water levels.

Satellites To Monitor Rising Ocean Levels

Over the past decade, the human impact on the Earth has been ghastly. The rising ocean levels are occurring not only because of melting glaciers and ice sheets, but also because of rising atmospheric temperatures. This is where the pair of satellites will come in by providing important data to adapt to climate change.

The pair of satellites to monitor rising ocean levels are identical and will be launched in a gap of five years. The mission is called Sentinel-6/Jason-CS (Jason Continuity of Service) and the satellites are named Sentinel-6A and Sentinel-6B. The German space company, IABG, has designed and developed the satellites.

The satellites are scheduled to launch from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in the US on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Each satellite has a life expectancy of seven years. As both will overlap each other, there will be a continuous flow of data. By the end of the decade-long mission, the satellites together would have gathered rising ocean level data for a total of 40 years.

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New Satellites To Continuously Gather Data

The Sentinel-6/Jason-CS mission follows the footsteps of other joint operations like the Ocean Surface Topography/Jason2, Topex/Poseidon, Jason-1, and more. Collectively, the data has shown that the oceans are rising at an average rate of 3 mm every year. The upcoming mission will map up to 95% of the Earth's ice-free oceans every 10 days.

The satellites are equipped with a radar altimeter, which will measure the ocean's changing shape, hills, valleys, plateaus, and more. All of this will input data for mapping oceanic currents. The satellites will also take along a microwave radiometer, POD or the Precise Orbit Determination Instruments, GNSS (radio occultation instrument), and others.

In addition to providing data on rising sea levels, the satellites will also give us weather forecasts. The joint operation is being developed by the European Space Agency, the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellite (EUMETSAT), NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Also, France's CNES and the European Commission are supporting the mission.