go to c-span.org to get your copy today. >> c-span is your unfiltered view of government. we are funded by these television companies and more including charter communications. >> charter is proud to be recognized as one of the best internet providers and we are just getting started, building 100,000 miles of new infrastructure to reach those who need it most. >> charter communications supports c-span a public service along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. >> nasser administered a bill nelson spoke with researchers within the organization about climate science in preparation for earth day. administrator nelson and the scientists also talk about tracking climate change on the ocean.

this is 40 minutes. >> we are getting so excited for earth day. we want to share some of the exciting earth science missions we have coming up and some announcements. today we have nasa administrator bill nelson, karen shake jermaine, division director for nasa earth sciences, tom waggoner, associate director for earth action within our earth sciences division. we have some exciting thing to discuss with you today. we will announce a new airborne science mission, new elements in our earth science strategy, as well as a new visualization from our mission, pace, plankton, aerosol, cloud, ocean ecosystem. first, administrator nelson will give us more information about what we are here for today. >> as you know, we are a climate agency in addition to being a space agency, aeronautical

research agency, and that is because we have these two dozen instruments and satellites on orbit that look at the earth, look at it, bring us data real-time within a matter of seconds that it takes the transmission from the satellites back to earth. we have all put together this earth information center to try and bring this information to the public. not only in a physical structure such as here at nasa headquarters, but also at one of these smithsonian institutions. but we bring in virtually as well to people. up to the minute, real-time data on what is happening to the earth, as seen by our spacecraft

. we are trying to bring the understanding that this is a precious, precious planet. it is one in our solar system around our star called the sun. we can see from space what is happening to the earth. when i flew in space 38 years ago, even with the naked eye, i could see the effects on earth coming across brazil. i could see the color contrast in the upper amazon region where they were cutting down the trees. in the same window of the spacecraft, i can look to the east, to the mouth of the amazon river, and i could see the result of that extra silt that was flowing hundreds of miles out into the atlantic.

same thing coming across the island nation of madagascar, the southeast corner of africa. back then, they had cut down all the trees. when the rains came, there were not any roots to hold the topsoil. the topsoil and running down the rivers. from space looking down on madagascar are, you could see the results of that so easily, all of that silt coming out from the rivers into the bright blue waters of the indian ocean. one of the effects that happen to me personally, i became more of an environmentalist when i went into space. today, on the occasion of earth day coming up, we have a couple of major announcements. we are going to show you, and our experts here are going to tell you about this new spacecraft that we put up called pace that is showing us all of

the phytoplankton in the waters of planet earth. you are going to see some of that phytoplankton that is stirred up by the currents. you will see in one case -- well, there it is. that is the tip of africa. look at all of that phytoplankton that hugs the coast until you get to the very southern tip. low and behold, that is the confluence of two oceans. the indian ocean to the east, atlantic to the west. when they meet, the waters swirl. all of that phytoplankton is caught up in that swirl. by the way, is it any wonder, at the tip of africa, it is a place

where there is a concentration of great white sharks and also whales? i think you can see real-time from pace, our instrument in space, why that is. pace it also looking at aerosols. that is one announcement. we have another announcement today. and it is that it is a, earth-venture program that will fund six new airborne missions. dr. st. germain go into the detail but i will tell you on the north slope of the alaska, the arctic slope of the chains, that is one. what happens when we get all of these wildfires that we have had and all of that smoke goes up

and creates clouds? clouds created by fire. what about the urban air pollution? sometimes if you go to a place in other parts of the world, you don't want to breathe, certainly do not want to go outside on you have got a mask, witch by the way i have been wearing recently in my jogging in washington, d.c. because there is so much pollen here. and you can hear it in my voice right now. we are also looking from our airborne platforms how drought and rainfall are affecting and shaping land. what about glacial ice? i will never forget, 15 years ago, i went to greenland, went up on that glacier.

i could see how that glacier, as the scientists were telling us, how it was moving, coming into the sea. and then agricultural admissions -- emissions. we take our agriculture very seriously. we can help farmers, tell farmers what is the moisture, sent of the soil -- content of the soil. how much water you want to reserve. what kind of crop ought you to plant on this soil with this water content. that is all a part of what we are going to announce today. >> thank you, sir. as you can see we have a lot of exciting things to talk about today. karen, i know earlier this year we launched our pace mission. last week we got to see the exciting new images but we have a new visualization that we will

see today. tell us why that is so important, tell us more about pace. karen: thanks, faith. we were super excited for the pace launch and now even just a few weeks later to see the first data coming out of the mission. we just released a data into the science community which is really where the power of these observations begins to be unleashed. pace is a mission that measures some of the tiniest things that have some of the greatest impact. in the oceans, phytoplankton. these are small, plant-like organisms that are some of the earliest organisms on earth. there are hundreds of thousands of types of phytoplankton. they form the base of the food web in our oceans. they also are responsible for taking carbon dioxide out of our

atmosphere. the carbon dioxide combined with the nutrients in the water and the sun's light create the plant matter itself, how the plants grow, but also releases oxygen into our atmosphere. the other thing that pace observes is aerosols in the atmosphere. aerosols come from a lot of different sources, from smoke from wildfires, from dust blowing off of the sahara. aerosols in our atmosphere form the nucleus for clouds, they reflect the sun's light, and actually they can form some of the nutrients that phytoplankton need to eat, to grow, sorry. by the way, the word "phytoplankton" comes from two greek words and it means wandering plant. phytoplankton moves through the

oceans but they play as an important role in our global system as all of the animals on land play. pace is giving us our first really detailed look. now we have animation that we will tee up for you to show you for the first time, some of the global data. can we run that animation? this is the pace instrument, ocean color instrument. it is mapping in great detail the color of the water below. we will zoom and off of the coast of the u.s. the first thing we are looking at is the greenness, a measure of chlorophyll. chlorophyll is that component of the plants that converts the sun's energy into plant mat ter. we cannot only see that that is growing but what kind of things. these two animations, we are

showing you different types of phytoplankton. they behave differently in the environment. those polar limiters that detect aerosol, they can detect smoke, different types of aerosols, and they can determine how large those aerosols are, where they are in the atmosphere and all of these different attributes, characteristics of aerosols matter a lot when we talk about how much sunlight they are reflecting, what kind of clouds they will create and so forth. pace is giving us this unprecedented view of the tiniest critters in the ocean, tiniest particles in the atmosphere, but in both cases, they play an enormous role in aquaculture, in fisheries, inhuman health, in our everyday lives. faith: definitely amazing that

we've been able to progress so much i know we also launched swat not long ago that is studying some of the same things. how will those work with each other to increase the data we are getting? karen: great question. in fact the visual that administrator nelson opened up with actually shows how biology and the physical movement of the oceans, which is what swat sees, how those work together to drive the phytoplankton into other regions. because they form the basis of the food web, where the phytoplankton go, where the ocean carries the phytoplankton, that is where the fish, the whales, the sharks go. faith: that is exciting. i know a lot of what we are talking about today is so important to let people be aware of. in our communities, we announced our earth science strategy action.

tom, if you could talk about what that means for nasa. tom: if you want to go on the web, you can see the strategy itself. what is important is that we are going to build on what we do at nasa with innovation and collaboration so that we can help users get the right data that they need at the right time. also, too, it increases our focus on being user-centered. we want to coproduce with users on what they need. the important thing about this now, we are at a pitiful moment. we have the challenges faced by climate change. at the same time we have our 25 nasa missions on orbit, international partners, and the commercial data. so we have this unprecedented view of the earth. when you add to that all the amazing things that have happened in the information technology world, advanced physical models, potentials with ai and machine learning, we cannot really answer questions at a very high level.

i want to give you an example of this. think about if you have ever made a fire, how wet or dry the wood is really affects how you can get the fire started, how fast it burns. it turns out farmers need this kind of information and firefighters need this kind of information but they need it in very different ways. let's take the farming example. farmers need to know how much water they need to irrigate their fields and how much fertilizer to go along with this. we partnered with a group called open et to take satellite data, especially land sat, to give farmers a field level view of the dryness of the field so they can make very precise decisions about how much water to put onto the field. that saves them money directly. it also preserves water, that precious resource, especially in drought stricken parts of the country. now take the firefighting case. they are trying to think about the status of the fuel itself. how dry is the wood, how much

wood is out there? we assess for firefighters what is out there ahead of time. during the fire itself, we will track where the fire is and think about where it's going. afterwards we look at the intensity of the fire to think about what the restoration will look like. did the fire get so hot that it destroyed all the seeds? which of the effort look like to restore all those areas? we also work in health and air quality come disasters, sea level rise, energy, a host of other areas. we work with our critical partners at noaa, department, national science foundation, and we are working at the user level. our goal is to create solutions that people use, and we want to coproduce those. faith: that is fantastic. administered her nelson mentioned some of those new airborne science missions we are announcing today.

that plays a part into that, how we can truly see around us, the way this is affecting us. karen, if you don't mind diving into some of those new missions. karen: this is a very exciting announcement for us. of course, much of what we do uses that unique vantage point of space to see the whole globe. but we perform science at multiple levels, including from aircraft, and that gives us inability to do detailed studies, to understand how phenomenon are operating, how the earth is operating at the local scale. that can be really important to help us understand what our satellites are seeing from space but it can also be really important to understand very specific questions. so, we run regularly these competitions for the best ideas

airborne campaigns, science questions we should go after, what instruments we should use to go after those questions. and then also but partners should be involved in those experiments, as well. today we are announcing six new selected airborne campaigns. they will take place over the course of the decades. they are staggered out over time. some of them take more than one experiment to accomplish the science. i will walk you through quickly through with a little more detail the six that we selected. the first one is really going after arctic coastal change. what are the things that we are seeing with a warming climate, changes in weather patterns is also changes in the way that water flows across our landscape.

it is nowhere more true than in the north slope of alaska. the city college of new york is leading these observations to really understand the changes to the river systems on the north slope of alaska. one of the cool things about this one, it is not just aircraft. this campaign will also include helicopters, boats, drones. it will be a major campaign. the second one is looking at -- and i think you mentioned this, tom -- the fact that if a wildfire is hot enough, it can create its own weather. we call these clouds pyro cumulonimbus. pyro coming from the fire and these are really tall clouds. the research leading this study on how clouds form, when wildfires burn hot enough to make their own weather. these experiments will be principally over the western

united states and canada. the third one is really going after our urban air pollution. this will be led by langley research center, capitalizing on the synergy between another launch that we had recently which was the tempo mission. really understanding, at the neighborhood scale, what are the pollutants that can affect human health, and how can we get better at forecasting those conditions, informing public health policy? the locations for this one will be north america. one location is over mexico city, which you'll be visiting, sir. another thing that is happening that we are seeing more and more, these changes in weather patterns that we are seeing, are also changing the landscape itself.

one of the ways this can happen, for example, wildfire clears vegetation but when precipitation comes, we see landslides, and those kinds of major events that change the shape of our earth. shifting mother, shifting land is the name of this one. the jet propulsion laboratory will look at droughts and rainfall and how they affect the stability of hillsides, the soil, rock, vegetation, the landslides that can result from these changes in the way that water is moving around the planet. really exciting and really important at the local level. the fifth one is, you mentioned retreating glaciers. we are looking at retreating glaciers, this one run by the university of arizona, leading this project to track retreating glaciers and ice sheets in ways that will help us improve our predictive capability there.

we will be traveling to alaska, greenland, canadian arctic, and even one of my favorite places -- to really understand how these glaciers, the rates of flow, weights of retreat are changing. the last one is focused on culture, called farm flux, run by goddard space flight center. researchers will measure greenhouse gases and other emissions, absorption from our farmlands. a set of six very different airborne campaigns. they will take place over a number of years and give us some really targeted insights held everything from how we understand how the earth works to how we put that science into action for people. faith: thanks, karen, for laying all that out. so important, a testament to how nasa is a climate agency, how we

are doing all of this to help everyday people. we are doing this all in anticipation of earth a day next week. just wanted to hear from each of you what earth day means to you. sir, do you want to start?

bill: from there we have the perspective of our planet which is so beautiful. then i think of one of our early space missions that went to the far reaches of the solar system and is now, we've got to spacecraft that are really out in interstellar space and are still communicating with us, by the way, on those to spacecraft. it takes 22 hours for the signal to reach our dishes in canberra australia. as this spacecraft is starting to go into the outer reaches of our solar system, the scientists decided to turn the camera around and look back at earth.

carl sagan describes it as a pale blue dot. and that's home. that's the place that is our home, our planet. it's the only planet we have. and we want to keep it. so that's why we are trying to offer nasa's expertise and the other agencies of the federal government to give us the information we need in order to be better stewards of what we have. >> what about you, karen? karen: i can't top that, boss. what i will say is i love earth day. i was talking with a group of students this morning and i was saying that it's a shame there

is only one earth day per year but there is a sunday every week. not cool. anyway, i love earth day because of it -- it's an opportunity for us to show people how the earth works and its unique perspective and how it looks from space. you talked about how beautiful our earth is and it surely is that it only gets more beautiful when you understand how it works. at least to me, that's part of the beauty that adds depth to the beauty. this is a day when we get specially to share that with many more people. when i go down to our earth information center right here at nasa headquarters and opening soon at the museum of natural history and at kennedy space

center, again, this is one of those ways we can show people the earth as we see it, share what we understand and for me, that's about hope. a lot of folks know that the climate is changing and it's impacting their communities. that can be discouraging. one of the things that we want to do is say when we understand what's happening, we can make decisions. a community that can learn is a community that can adapt and move forward and continue to thrive. that is really what i'm hopeful about on earth day. >> that's awesome. do you want to share? >> not to top those but to me, the big thing about earth day is it's a time to reflect a little bit. the fact is, the planet isn't just changing, it has already changed.

i feel like we have the tools, we have the knowledge, we have the wherewithal not only to deal with the changes that have happened but also set about trying to make the world a better place in the future. i have children and i think about that a lot. i'm hopeful because of that but i'm also hopeful because even in my lifetime, we have addressed these global challenges, things like we were worried about whales when i was a kid and the california condor and worried about the ozone layer. those are things where we made progress and that's what gives me hope for the future. >> great. we've been able to hear a whole lot. now i think we have some questions for you all. i will start with 1 -- administrator nelson, maybe you can kick us off by telling us how what we are doing now these science missions will be impactful in the future for the artemis generation? >> go to earth.gov and there is

a comp violation of information -- a compilation of information that will give you the up-to-date information as well as a perspective of what is happening to the earth. everything we've been talking about. most of that information you can see on earth.gov. i think this all plays into earth day which is your question , but earth day is every day. it ought to be every day. please use these tools that we have created starting with the earth information center which now becomes a part of earth.gov. >> great. karen or tom, nasa has been the coin space agency but you are so much more, aeronautics and

science. houtman long has nasa -- how long has nasa been studying earth? >> 60 years ago and the two first mission areas that nasa got into as a result of that recognition that space is not just about going out there, it's about seeing our home planet and a new way for the first time. that earth rise photo you talked about, that gave rise to this notion that we can study how land is changing so what is today the land sat series is one of the first uses of space to study earth as well as weather satellites. 50-60 years for both of those mission areas and then we've added along the way studying many other aspects of the system. >> one of the fun things we did recently around the office's we went back and looked at one of

the nasa videos from the early 1970's about what the earth observing systems would look like. it's amazing that we have really built it. even in my time, i started my career in earth science in the late 1980's. over that time, we've gone from just the pictures of the earth to try to understand it and starting to make these fundamental measurements in the 90's. then you get to the oughts and you start to understand the processes. today with all the missions we have data covering all different areas of science from deep part of the earth to the top of the atmosphere and we got the tools to interpret that and figure out what really means. people can use this data in their daily lives to solve problems. it's a very exciting time to be in this field and thinking about where it will go next. >> that's amazing and hearing about those decades we've been studying the earth. how are these new project

submissions announcing, how is that technology are those lenses transformed since then? >> as you were talking, i was thinking about the sea level. when i was a graduate student, should i say the year? i guess i will, in the early 1990's, we launched the first ocean ultimate or, a satellite that transmits a signal and it bounces off the ocean surface and comes back the satellite. and by measuring that time-of-flight, we can measure very precisely the level of the oceans. we launched the first of those missions in the early 1990's and i was a graduate student and i played a very small role in the calibration and validation of that mission. 30 years later, i started this job and my first launch was a

satellite called sentinel 6, it was the continuation, i think the sixth in line of those ocean ultimate her's. -- ocean altimeters. we now understand over 30 years of exactly what has happened with sea levels. prior to that, what we had was tide gauges. they were in coastal communities and we didn't have a global view. when we talk about the new technologies, wheat now not only have been measuring sealevel rise for 30 years but we have those complement remissions, a gravity mission which tells us how much of that sea rise is due to water leaving ice sheets and glaciers and getting added to the ocean. because we measure temperatures, we know how much of that sealevel rise is because the ocean is expanding as it warms. this is really the key of coming

back. the diversity of these observations that we make from all of the satellites in those airborne campaigns, it gives us a view of not just what is happening but why it's happening. we know it because we measure it. that is just incredibly powerful to me. >> and to build on that point, we've made tremendous advances in how we display the data and give people access. if you go to earth. go one of the things you can do is see all the amazing data on greenhouse gases. there is even a touch screen where you can scroll and see where things are being released from. we've got a sealevel rise portals as well as other portals. we work with the other agencies on this. we worked closely withnoah to take the weather reports and we buy commercial data area it allows us to see into areas where we have a lot of cloud cover and we get a lot of

access. we can see through the cloud cover and we spend a lot of time at headquarters trying to knit that stuff together and get as much of it out there as we can. >> you mentioned working with noa and you mentioned other government agencies we work with to bring the data to people and study our earth. with some of the missions we have coming up this year where we partner with internationally, why is it it's so important to partner with other agencies and international partners to study the earth? >> because we all inhabit the earth. for example, our nysar mission which will look and calibrate changes in the earth's surface, we're doing that as a joint project. it's one of the great observatories, combination of all of this couple of dozen instruments in space are giving us the observatory.

nysar with the indian government is another point of reference. then what we will do is we will become more sophisticated. we are going to combine all of this data over time into a 3d, very precise composite of what is happening to our planet. again, it hopefully will have the end result of making us better stewards of what we have. >> that's great. we mentioned nysar, what else do we have to look forward to with earth science coming up? we rolled out the six new missions today do what else can we look forward to? >> i will just build on the nysar thing first. you are right, this enterprise

of understanding the earth is one we undertake with countries around the world. nysar will be the most sophisticated radar we've ever launched and can see changes down to less than half an inch in position of land which moves up and down, in positions in vegetation and forests. we will see changes that are very detailed. we would not be able to do that if we work doing it with in international partner. when we work with their partners, we can do much more than the sum of what we could do individually and that is critically important. >> one of the other things you will see his every day, we get better at using the data to answer critical questions. with the new missions like swat that will be a powerful tool to understand things like in land flooding and soil moisture, lot will come out of that.

we will be looking at what causes harmful algorithms. you are looking to see more and more things in the next few years. >> we look forward to it. i will end with one last question for whoever wants to jump in. if there was a child or someone asking how i can specifically make the greatest impact to protect the earth, what would you tell them? >> i talked to school kids a lot about it. every decision you make impacts the earth. you turn off a light switch, that's less co2 that went into the atmosphere. you want to use a reusable bottle, you are a part of the solution just by being a person who is attuned to and you can make that change. >> i agree with that absolutely and also, if this is a passion for you, you can grow up and join us in doing the work we do.

it's not just important, it's exciting. it's fun. we really want students out there today to be inspired by what they see and want to join us when they are ready to do it. >> we are all citizens of planet earth. we all have a responsibility of taking care of our homeland and our homeland is the planet. >> i cannot have ended on a better note. i want to thank you guys so much for joining us today. we have a lot of great, exciting new earth science missions we are getting ready for earth day at nasa and one of the cool things we are doing is we have a social campaign called global selfie where we encourage you to go out in your community and take a picture of yourself in your corner of the world with

the #global selfie. bonus points if you include your favored body of water. this year the nasa theme is water which touches everything. over 75% of the world is covered by water and it's important we study it and protect it. in case you needed an example, we will take our own little selfie right here. all right. i want to thank you guys again for joining us and we encourage you to go out in your community and celebrate earth day. at nasa headquarters in d.c., we have exciting events happening right here. we have a lot of exciting things to look forward to an thank you so much for joining us. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2024]

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