How these Objectives are met:
The objectives set by the Earth Science Enterprise can will be achieived by answering the 23 questions the ESE have asked about the workings of the global Earth system. To be answered, these questions require scientific measurements from various satellites and sensors to be answered. NPP will help achieive these goals by providing the measurements necessary to help answer 10 of these questions.
The following section shows highlights the what questions are asked to fulfill each objective, and the measurements NPP will take to answer the each question.
Objective 1: Discern and describe how the global Earth system is changing.
Question: How are global precipitation, evaporation, and the cycling of water changing?
Measurement required to answer: Atmospheric temperature and moisture profiles.
Q: How is the global ocean circulation varying on inter-annual, decadal, longer time scales?
M: Sea surface temperature data.
Q: How are global ecosystems changing?
M: Ocean color measurements and vegaetation indices.
Objective 2: Identify and measure primary causes of change in the Earth system.
Question: What trends in the atmospheric constitutents and solar radiation are driving climate change?
Measurement required to answer: Aerosol properties.
Q: What are the changes in global land cover and land use, and what are their causes?
M: Land cover, and fire occurreance data
Objective 3: Determine how the Earth system responds to natural and human induced changes.
Question: What are the effects of clouds and surface hydrologic processes on Earth's climate?
Measurement required to answer: Cloud system structure, cloud particle size, properties, and distributions data
Q: How do ecosystems respond to and affect global environmental change and the carbon cycle?
M: Coastal marine productivity, and carbon sources sinks data.
Objective 4: Identify the consequences of changes for human civilization.
Question: What are the consequences of land cover and land use?
Measurement required to answer: Primary productivity data, and land cover inventories.
Objective 5: Enable the prediction of Earth system changes that will take place in the future.
Question: How can weather forecast duration and reliability be improved by new space-based observations, data assimilation, and modeling?
Measurement required to answer: Sea surface temperature data
Q: How well can transient climate variations be understood and predicted?
M: Sea surface temperature data.
