NASA's NPP Satellite Acquires First VIIRS Image

GREENBELT, Md. -- The Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard NASA's newest Earth-observing satellite, NPP, acquired its first measurements on Nov. 21, 2011. This high-resolution image is of a broad swath of Eastern North America from Canada’s Hudson Bay past Florida to the northern coast of Venezuela. The VIIRS data were processed at the NOAA Satellite Operations Facility (NSOF) in Suitland, Md.

VIIRS is one of five instruments onboard the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project (NPP) satellite that launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., on Oct. 28. Since then, NPP reached its final orbit at an altitude of 512 miles (824 kilometers), powered on all instruments and is traveling around the Earth at 16,640 miles an hour (eight kilometers per second).

"This image is a next step forward in the success of VIIRS and the NPP mission," said James Gleason, NPP project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

VIIRS will collect radiometric imagery in visible and infrared wavelengths of the Earth's land, atmosphere, and oceans. By far the largest instrument onboard NPP, VIIRS weighs about 556 pounds (252 kilograms). Its data, collected from 22 channels across the electromagnetic spectrum, will be used to observe the Earth's surface including fires, ice, ocean color, vegetation, clouds, and land and sea surface temperatures.

"VIIRS heralds a brightening future for continuing these essential measurements of our environment and climate," said Diane Wickland, NPP program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington. She adds that all of NPP's five instruments will be up and running by mid-December and NPP will begin 2012 by sending down complete data.

"NPP is right on track to ring in the New Year," said Ken Schwer, NPP project manager at NASA Goddard. "Along with VIIRS, NPP carries four more instruments that monitor the environment on Earth and the planet's climate, providing crucial information on long-term patterns to assess climate change and data used by meteorologists to improve short-term weather forecasting."

NPP serves as a bridge mission from NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) of satellites to the next-generation Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) program that will also collect weather and climate data. NASA Goddard manages the NPP mission for the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The JPSS program provides the NPP ground system and NOAA provides operational support.

During NPP's five-year life, the mission will extend more than 30 key long-term datasets that include measurements of the atmosphere, land and oceans. NASA has been tracking many of these properties for decades. NPP will continue measurements of land surface vegetation, sea surface temperature, and atmospheric ozone that began more than 25 years ago.

"The task now for the science community is to evaluate VIIRS performance and determine the accuracy of its data products," said Chris Justice a professor of geography at the University of Maryland, College Park, who will be using VIIRS data in his research.

"These long-term data records are critical in monitoring how the Earth's surface is changing - either from human activity or through climate change."

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Climate Change and the Developing World

The United Nations Development Program delivered some dire news Wednesday in its annual Human Development Report. By midcentury, it said, the development progress of the poorest countries will be halted or even reversed if bold steps are not taken to forestall the effects of climate change.

“The poorest countries’ really remarkable and often overlooked progress in recent decades now faces this calamity down the road,” said William Orme, a spokesman for the agency. “If their progress is stopped because we developed countries didn’t do things that we could have, it adds a huge moral imperative to take action sooner rather than later on climate change.”

The study tracks 187 countries and territories in the U.N.’s human development index, which is based on composite measurements of health, education and income, and has tracked global living standards since 1990.

From 1970 to 2010, countries in the lowest 25 percent of the rankings improved their scores by a striking 82 percent, twice the global average. If this pace of improvement continues over the next 40 years, the report says, most of these countries would achieve standards equal to or better than those now enjoyed by the top 25 percent.

But models of future scenarios cast doubt that this progress will come to pass.

Factoring in the effects of global warming on weather, food production and pollution, the index’s average score drops 8 percent worldwide from what would otherwise be predicted (and it drops by 12 percent in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia). In the more adverse “disaster” scenario — which entails vast deforestation, dramatic biodiversity declines and increasing extreme weather — the global index falls by 15 percent, with the deepest losses felt in poor regions.

Providing electricity to the 1.5 billion people — 45 percent of them in Africa — who currently live without it would be a step in the right direction, Mr. Orme says. Electricity means children can study at night, electric stoves can be used instead of pollution-emitting coal, and people can have access to a wider community through television or radio. “We can do this without increasing global CO2 by even 1 percent,” he says.

The agency proposes an international tax on foreign exchange trading to raise $40 billion toward that goal. And it says reducing carbon-dioxide emissions in developed nations — Denmark, for example, has pledged to cut emissions by 40 percent within the decade — can be achieved without lowering living conditions.

As for the United States, it ranked fourth over all in the development index. But when the rankings were adjusted for “internal inequalities,” the United States fell to 23rd, from 13th last year, mainly because of inequalities in income and health care, the report says.

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