A dim view for Earth emerges

WALNUT CREEK, CALIF. -

When Stanford climate scientist Christopher Field looks at visual feeds from a satellite monitoring deforestation in the Amazon basin, he sees images streaked with white lines devoid of data.

The satellite, Landsat 7, is broken. And it's emblematic of the nation's battered satellite environmental monitoring program. The bad news: It's only going to get worse, unless the federal agencies criticized for their poor management of the satellite systems over the past decade stage a fast turnaround. Many, however, view that prospect as a long shot.

"I would say our ability to observe the Earth from space is at grave risk of dying from neglect," said Field, director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University.

Inez Fung, a noted climatologist at the University of California at Berkeley, was shocked as she scanned a recent federal report warning of impending gaps in the country's ability to monitor Earth from space.

The federal document, released in May, listed cuts in climate-monitoring sensors from the next generation of Earth-observing satellites. The current satellites beam down many types of indispensable data about the planet, such as ocean currents, ozone levels and snow cover, as well as the pictures viewers see every day on TV weathercasts.

But key instruments on the new satellites have been eliminated: Gone is a sensor that would relay new data about the atmosphere and environmental conditions in the ocean and along coastal areas. The movement of pollutants and greenhouse gases would have been under the instrument's mechanical gaze, as well.

Also absent is a critical sensor that monitors temperature changes over time on Earth.

"That's like if you have a sick patient, and then say, 'I have no more thermometers,' " Fung said.

In all, nine new climate instruments on the next generation of satellites were canceled or their capabilities scaled back in 2006, according to the Government Accountability Office report.

Combined with a five-year delay in launching these next-generation satellites, with the first scheduled to blast off in 2011, these canceled or "degraded" instruments leave the nation facing critical gaps in satellite monitoring of the planet beginning in 2015, the report stated. And a National Academy of Sciences analysis of the disarray in the satellite program stressed that because of Earth's growing population, it's more crucial than ever to monitor pollution, water quality, land use and other environmental conditions.