Climate Change Data Deluge Has Scientists Scrambling for Solutions - WSJ - 0 views
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For decades, scientists working to predict changes in the climate relied mostly on calculations involving simple laws of physics and chemistry but little data from the real world. But with temperatures world-wide continuing to rise—and with data-collection techniques and technologies continuing to advance—scientists now rely on meticulous measurements of temperatures, ocean currents, soil moisture, air quality, cloud cover and hundreds of other phenomena on Earth and in its atmosphere.
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“Now we can truly do climate studies because now we have observations to precisely say how weather trends have changed and are changing,
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“When you are trying to develop long-term environmental records, including climate records, consistent measurement is incredibly valuable,” says Kevin Murphy, who as NASA’s chief science data officer oversees an archive of Earth observation data used by 3.9 million people last year. “It’s irreplaceable data.”
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Over the next decade, officials managing the main U.S. repositories of climate-related information expect their archives’ total volume to grow from about 83 petabytes today to more than 650 petabytes.
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One petabyte of digital memory can hold thousands of feature-length movies, with 650 enough to hold the contents of the Library of Congress 30 times over.
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All that information, though, is more than conventional data storage can handle and more than any human mind can readily assimilate,
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To accommodate it all, the federal workers tasked with managing the data are moving it into the cloud, which offers almost unlimited memory storage while eliminating the need for scientists to maintain their own on-site archive
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archive managers are devising new analytical techniques and adapting a standard format for the data no matter who collected it and who wants to study it.
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As of last September, government agencies and private companies had about 900 Earth-orbiting satellites gathering data about our planet, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. That is almost three times as many as were aloft in 2008. More are being readied for launch.
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ASA’s $1 billion Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission will measure Earth’s lakes, rivers and oceans in the first detailed global survey of the planet’s surface water.
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That is a drop in the data bucket compared with the space agency’s $1.5 billion Nisar radar imaging satellite, which is scheduled for launch in January 2023. Its sensors will detect movements of the planet’s land, ice sheets and sea ice as small as 0.4 inches, transmitting 80 terabytes of data every day.
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With current data handling systems and typical internet connections, it would take a climate researcher about a year to download just four days’ worth of Nisar dat
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NASA and NOAA are working with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Corp. to move their climate databases into the cloud.
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Earlier this year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the first time used data on past climate behavior to gauge the reliability of climate models for policy makers.