Advanced Platform Technologies Enabling Efficient Distributed Sensing System for Earth Science

The future vision of understanding interactions of Earth system components on a global scale requires consistent, reliable global data that are most easily collected from space. While tremendous progress has been made in the past decades in understanding trends in isolated Earth system variables (such as atmospheric temperature), there are still many dynamic processes and interactions that require dense observations both spatially and temporally to resolve. Examples include biogeochemical cycles (including the carbon cycle), vegetation recovery, surface hydrology and precipitation, ocean salinity, atmospheric chemistry and pollution, surface deformation, and radiative flux. Developing deeper understanding of the Earth system and enabling reliable predictive capabilities will require abundant observations to initialize, correct and validate models of complex behavior. Various phenomena, which may be observed from space, have different temporal and spatial scale requirements. For example, severe storms evolve quickly, and observations every 15 minutes or less may be required. On the other hand, ice sheets evolve slowly and thus may be observed less continuously. Similar arguments can b