LA CAÑADA FLINTRIDGE >> The first NASA satellite measuring soil moisture to predict droughts, floods and climate change is scheduled to launch from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base Thursday.
The $916 million investment has been in the works for eight years and is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, based in La Cañada Flintridge.
JPL’s Kent Kellogg, project manager of the Soil Moisture Active Passive mission, said he’s extremely eager to see a 6:20 a.m. Thursday launch on a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket. If all goes well, the SMAP satellite will circle earth from 426 miles away and will repeat its track every eight days.
“It’s also at a point where you’re putting all the marbles on the table,” Kellogg said. “It’s like handing over the keys to your teenager. You hope you’ve prepared them well, but you hope all of the lessons stick. And then you send them off, and most of the time, you’re pleasantly surprised.”
It will produce global maps that measure liquid and frozen water on the planet’s top 2 inches of soil. This continuous stream of data will be distributed to 38 “Early Adopters,” including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Geological Survey, StormCenter and U.N. World Food Programme in Rome.
Scientists believe the never-before obtained raw data will help predict agricultural productivity, droughts and wildfires, floods and landslides, human health, national security and weather and climate.
Currently there aren’t enough ground sensors to map the variability in global soil moisture at a level that is accurate enough for scientists and decision makers to use. Worldwide, the amount of water in soil varies between some four percent in desert regions to about 45 percent in saturated soils.
“Today’s computer models disagree on how the water cycle — precipitation, clouds, evaporation, runoff, soil water, availability — will increase or decrease over time and in different regions as our world warms,” said Dara Entekhabi, SMAP Science Team Leader from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a statement. “SMAP’s higher-resolution soil moisture data will improve the models used to make daily weather and longer-term climate predictions.”
Experts elaborated on the mission at a prelaunch news conference Tuesday at Vandenberg.
SMAP is the key to uniting the ebb and flow of Earth’s water, energy and carbon cycles, Entekhabi said.
Energy from the sun’s rays evaporate the water locked in soil, which kicks off the water cycle and rainfall.
“The very definition of drought is based on what the soil moisture is. Right now we are basing that assessment on models,” he said. “(SMAP) impacts how we fundamentally understand how the environment works. It peers into the metabolism of the environment.”
Additionally, the start of the growing season is marked by the thawing of water in dirt. Mapping freeze and thaw soil states will help scientists account for how much carbon plants are expected to remove from the atmosphere each year. And knowing carbon levels could help experts better assess the future of global warming.
SMAP will spend its first year collecting data and undergoing calibration and validation to ensure data accuracy.
Although the mission is set for three years, Kellogg said the spacecraft could remain healthy for longer than a decade.
