BalloonsandWeatherVOTY

Footage for a story on weather forecasting through the eyes of balloonists and the contributions of JPSS and the NWS.

What is said in the film

So we're now in a situation where every year is going to be seeing extremes that have had a contribution from that global warming because we're this is the 7th year in a row that the temperatures have been more than about two degrees Fahrenheit above the late 19th century and that's enough to be having an effect on daily weather. So we're seeing things like the Pacific Northwest heat wave sending record temperatures across that whole region Or we're seeing marine heat waves. We're seeing intense rainfall. All of these things are coming and they're going to be we're seeing them every year because we are now in a globally warmed world. So obviously nobody really lives in the global average temperature but what we've seen is that the changes in that measure are so large now that we're seeing it in local and regional temperature changes.

And we're seeing it in local and temperature weather events And so the rainfall, when it rains, it's raining more intensely. We're seeing that everywhere. Even at a local scale. We're seeing the strength and duration of heat waves, increasing everywhere even on a local scale. We're seeing the impacts of that global warming temperature and the melting ice impacting sea level.

And that's impacting coastal flooding rates everywhere pretty much along the coast, particularly on the East Coast, which is a which is a hot spot for sea level rise And so the changes that we've seen are now large enough that we can detect them that where we are. We don't need to just be looking at these kind of big aggregate global measures to see the changes that we have wrought. Oh so Landsat is, Landsat 9, is the latest in an almost 50 year series of measurements starting our way back in the 1970s and that gives us a unique view of the surface and the changes on the surface. a lot of which are related to climate change. so we can use the Landsat data to go back and look at glaciers are retreating overtime, changes in stream flow, changes in lakes, changes in fire - we can see those scars we can see those marks, those fingerprints in the landscape that we can now document over those many decades and so we can see, those changes.

The overall monitoring of the climate system from satellite is absolutely essential for us not just to know how things are changing, but why things are changing. Looking at the process is looking at the clouds looking at the water vapor, looking at what the impacts are on ozone. All of those things are being looked at from space using NASA instruments and our international partners, and they're giving us a very, very clear picture of what's happening throughout the whole system. It's not just that the surface is warming. The changes are being seen everywhere and those changes have a unique fingerprint that tells us that this is basically due to our activities.

Well, unfortunately, it's more of the same. We're going to see greater levels of sea level rise. We're going to see more heat waves. We're going to see more intense precipitation. We're going to see more intense storms in tropical cyclones and hurricanes in the Atlantic.

We're going to see a shifts North of the storm tracks. We’re going to see decreases even more in the Arctic sea ice. We're going to see in continued mass loss from Greenland and West Antarctica and so these are the things that we predicted would happen, you know decades ago, and and now they are happening and we're just anticipating that they're going to happen more and more rapidly, if we don't change the trajectory that the planet is on.

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