Space Technology as the Tool in Climate Change Monitoring System

Abstract

Today the climate change as an important issue is discussed widely around the world. Many scientists relate global warming and its consequences to human activities and not to natural fluctuations. The reasoning of this approach is the time scale of climate change. Recent warming of the earth is considered to be abrupt compared to the time scale usually accompanied with natural climate change episodes. As obvious the Earth’s natural climate changes happen gradually in a long period of time (tens of thousands to millions of years) but we are witnessing an abrupt change over the past 200 years. The main reason is the industrial revolution with fossil fuels as its main source of energy which is setting a steady emission increase of Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases which trap heat causing an increase of temperature in the lower atmosphere. Climate change is recognized as the significant aspect for investigation and international communities through the United Nations created special groups to focus on climate change effects and initiated protocols to organize a global response to deal with its consequences. Unusually behaviors of the strong tropical storms, heavy precipitations causing a devastating floods, more frequent heat waves, frequents drought and other similar natural events are connected to a modern climate change. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, refer to climate change as the “defining issue of our era”. This calls, among others, for implementation of commitment to stabilize greenhouse emissions and furnish a report about the current status of climate change to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on the status of greenhouse gases and climate change impacts and mitigation. Climate change problem has a global scale which must be addressed with global models and global data are needed as input to these models. Currently there are sufficient space data sources with different spatial resolution which successfully implementing and applying for climate change monitoring and study purposes. Earth Observation from Space has a unique capacity to provide such global data sets in a continuous way. However the Earth Observation from Space also provides data on national and local scales which can successfully support in an implementation of the convention and protocol and encourage