Will clouds help cool or warm our world in the years ahead? The EarthCARE satellite will soon blast off on a mission to find out, aiming to investigate what role clouds could play in the fight against climate change.
Will clouds help cool or warm our world in the years ahead? The EarthCARE satellite will soon blast off on a mission to find out, aiming to investigate what role clouds could play in the fight against climate change.
The collaboration between the European Space Agency and Japan’s JAXA space agency is scheduled to launch Tuesday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from California’s Vandenberg base.
The two-ton satellite will orbit nearly 400 kilometers (250 miles) above Earth for three years, building a complete profile of those fluffy clouds over our heads.
« They are one of the main contributors to how the climate changes—and one of the least understood, » Dominique Gillieron, head of the ESA’s Earth observation projects department, told AFP.
Clouds—from cumulus and cirrus to cumulonimbus—are a varied and complicated phenomenon.
Their composition depends on where they are located in the troposphere, Earth’s lowest layer of atmosphere, Gillieron explained.
