Nice to be back and see such friendly faces, someone I haven't seen for a long time.
So what I'm going to talk about today is the organisation of observations, how we organise observations for climate.
And then some examples of where they come from in terms of satellite observations.
So observations are clearly very important. And if you can imagine what we would have been doing with the Earth as a planet 100 years ago,
you would have stuck a thermometer in its mouth and tried to decide from that
whether it had liver cancer or lung disease or heart failure or whatever.
But now we have many different systems and bit like you see the poor patient here is wide up in all sorts of different ways.
And so we need to make so many different types of observations to better understand and predict what's actually going on.
And there's been a long history of this, I guess, even before these dates.
But the first observations, which really are useful are the ones which were made by Flamsteed and Cassini back in the late 17th century.
The first observations of the numbers of sunspots.
And it was their observations which gave us the famous more than the minimum back in the late 19th century and have been related to this.
All right. But ever since Alexander von Humboldt was the famous explorer and geophysicist in the early 19th century,
made enormous amounts of observations, particularly in South America.
And after him, mostly very reluctantly, he allowed the Humboldt current to the cold currents up the west coast of South America to be named after him.
And he was very embarrassed by that. But it was Lieutenant Maury who was actually an American naval lieutenant who
convened the first conference on consistent observations for Meterology in 1953,
and that subsequently led to the setting up of the International Meteorological Organisation, which is now the the World Meteorological Organisation,
which had its Congress in the last few days, and then really starts modern observations,
organised observations thought through the API of the International Geophysical Year 1957,
first setting up of the World Weather Watch and the Global Atmosphere Research Program in the 1960s, the World Climate Conference.
The first of those was in 1979, which set up the World Climate Program, the World Climate Research Program,
and then a number of different events which led up to the Second World Climate
Conference in 1990 with the number of distinguished individuals sitting in the back.
If you recognise some of I guess, and this is what set up the global climate observing system,
and that's the body which is responsible for defining the requirements which are needed for IPCC and for the UN after policy,
both of which have been set up in the previous climate conference.
And I'm for it doesn't make the observations,
but it works with organisations which do provide observations to make sure that they made in the right way with the right specification.
And this is reflected in the actual the Convention on Climate Change,
the text of the convention which has specific reference to systematic observations in a number of places,
and this is reported formally back to the UN official policy.
Every year it's there conference of the parties and this is particularly important.
One The first plan for observations was set up in 1995 under the first chairman of the of the steering committee,
which was John Horton later this parish.
Some of you at least will remember and since then this has been implemented over a period of the last, what, 20 years?
We're now on the third version of this plan,
and we have a status report which will be delivered to the COP21 in Paris towards the end of this year, which tells us where we stand today.
And on the basis of this, a new implementation plan will be delivered in a year's time.
So this is a very comprehensive suite of observations that are needed for all aspects of climate understanding.
And the status report will comprise two things,
which is a progress report against the last implementation plan set up five years ago, which has 140 actions in it.
So we will be reporting on an individual basis against those, but also a broader assessment of where we stand,
even if we actually completed everything in the last plan, doesn't necessarily mean we have everything that we need to do.
So there's a second element, which is an overall assessment of adequacy.
This gets delivered at the end of this year and forms the basis for a new implementation plan next year.
And the next plan, I think, will be a little bit more broad, not necessarily in the content, but in the relevance.
And so there's an unstated and unofficial reference that really the observations, of course,
have been responsible for up until now have been essentially for the science, the understanding of climate change.
So it's basically what IPCC Working Group One has been responsible for.
But increasingly, we're now asked to try and support the work of the other two working groups of IPCC, which is about adaptation and mitigation.
And I'll share some of the observations. For that matter.
But it's important, I think, to understand and I think we have a real problem with communication environment.
And one of the things we should be doing here is explaining what the importance of these observations to a broader community.
So those working for adaptation and mitigation,
which is much more to do with the everyday life and the effects of climate change adaptation in particular,
how does it relate to things like climate services?
How do we support the science that's going in the other aspects, not only in climate, energy cycle, the water cycle, carbon cycle?
How can we support the other conventions, the Convention on Biodiversity or the UN Convention for combating this occasion?
And I think a lot there's a lot more relevance can be done with the observations
we're making without necessarily expanding the list of observations greatly.
And we also need to think about some of the other aspects of it supporting observations, the need for object restitution, the ultimate regional use.
Unless you have a very precise orbit underpinning that the need for global gravity
measurements which also lead to better orbit restitution on a number of others.
And I'll talk a little bit about vital science, and this comes back to the question of communication.
You may have heard Keith Shine this morning on the radio.
I don't know if you've heard him talking about the apparent changes in the hiatus, so I'll mention that live.
And this is one point just by way of reference. You should be aware that in order to prepare for the next implementation plan,
where there will be an international science conference hosted by G Cos in the Netherlands Royal Academy in the middle of in March next year.
So this will be quite important understanding how to define the observations that are needed for the next generation of models and also for the,
I think the much broader economic, political and social needs which are deriving from better information about climate.
Now, that doesn't mean to say we're all suddenly going to turn into social scientists,
but I think we should be more aware of the relevance of what we're doing and help to guide a little bit more what the relevance of the science is.
So that's really that's the bitmoji costs.
And the upshot of all the work, which of course is done, is to produce a list of so-called essential climate variables.
And these were developed in the the third, the second version of the implementation plan in 2003,
and this is a list of what have been defined by a broad scientific consensus are the 50 important variables that are needed spanning the ocean,
the atmosphere and the land roughly roughly a third each, which are needed to understand modern climate change and climate physics properly.
And this is being very powerful. I mean, it's a somewhat arbitrary set, but it is very important to actually define a set.
And everybody from, you know, more than the 15 years that these have been in existence has had their own set.
But if you wanted to have a coherent activity to try and address delivering the observations,
you first will have to decide exactly what it is the observations are how you define the precision of those observations and so on.
It's not just the name, but how frequently, on what physical scale, with what, what's precision and so on.
Each measurement is made. So setting up this rather somewhat arbitrary list of the science of climate variables
was actually a major step forward in allowing the people to respond to it.
And this is the Disney version. You can see that distributed amongst the various different balance of the Earth system.
And satellites were a very important part of this.
This is the first image taken from space of the Earth from July.
Ross 1st April 1960. I always think it's very humbling when I see this, actually,
because this is two and a half years after the first satellite was launched and within a few months of this, Yuri Gagarin was in space.
Some nine years later, we have the man on the moon the way we progressed these days and still be thinking about a free phase,
I think for the time this was coming.
So it's a bit embarrassing sometimes to think that two and a half years after you able to send a beach ball up in space,
you were producing something that gave you a pretty passable image of what weather looked like on the earth from above.
And satellites have continued to be very important in responding to the the needs of g cost.
So if we look back at the last implementation time, which is this one was in 2006,
so we have the plan which tells us what you need to measure, how you need to measure them and what the definition should be.
There are also a set of climate monitoring principles which are, in addition to the famous call principles on climate concrete,
which tell you about the length of time you need to measure them, the type of decision you need to make, and so on.
So they they are an important adjunct to the list of observations to be made so that when you.
Write an implementation plan and very helpfully G Cos at the time wrote a supplement
for this for the space agencies to say don't bother reading the whole plan.
This is the bit that you need to concentrate on. So it's a very it was a subset of the overall plan which said what satellites should be delivering.
And then the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites, which is the body which represents about 30, all the major space agencies worldwide,
came up with a document which was essentially a plan for how to respond amongst all of them and between them to the needs for details.
So again, this is part of a coherence system because you had the OECD, because you have a well defined requirement,
you can have a a straightforward response to that and actually make some progress.
So again, I emphasise how important it is to have a coherent set of requirements.
And of course satellites are very important for all sorts of reasons,
and I just give some examples of the sort of data that you can see from satellites.
Earth observation. Sorry, sea level rise is clearly an extremely important parameter.
And so this is the sort of arguments that one gets from a suite of different activities we see
over here going back to 1991 with the Earth one year to and then through to far the latest one,
which has been funded jointly by France and India. And you see that continuing pretty well and 1 to 5 point constant increases in sea level rise.
I'll just point out this little bit here and I'll come back to that in a few slides time.
But the interesting thing about satellites is that you can measure this one just as a global average,
but you can disassociate it and disaggregated across the world.
And you see that while the world is on average going up at about three millimetres the decade from here, then pretty much zero.
So then that's not the same everywhere the West Coast,
the United States and you actually have sea level is dropping in relation to the land as a result of by social to see another aspect going on.
But in areas like this in the southeast and southwest Pacific in Southeast Asia,
which is coincidentally and unfortunately some of the most vulnerable areas to sea level rise,
you're actually seeing sea level increasing at about four or five times the rate of average global life.
And I gave this talk a couple of on this show, this slide a couple of months ago at a meeting of the UN after the sea.
And the previous speaker was from the Solomon Islands Meteorological Agency.
And these are the Solomon Islands. Yeah.
So they were actually quite concerned about sea level rise because they're seeing something which is even by the minimum projections is going
to be something like one and a half metres by the end of the century as opposed to the 30 centimetres minimum that we're seeing globally.
So they are significantly worried about it.
So in order to respond to this in a more coherent way, the committee set up this this working group on climate data,
which is now led by this guy here, Pascale Lecomte, who is actually based on all of this group as this photograph has taken out.
And he's now the chairman of this in the climate, the climate office, which looks after these activities.
But this is also done in Holland as well. So this is something else that we should try and build stronger links with.
And this is now teamed up with the the group on meteorological satellite sea games.
So this really encompasses all the space agencies, not just the research agencies like ISA and Ambassador, but also Noa.
You met Sam, the Japanese, Chinese, Korean Indian Met Services, Russian Metservice and so on.
And so we have a coherent plan to try and deliver these space observations to climate and in order to do that.
And so we've set up a program called the ISA Climate Change Initiative, the ISA CCI, which is managed I could follow.
And this involves a whole range of hundreds,
literally hundreds of scientists worldwide looking at a range of different aspects of the OECD over a long term period.
So this is funded at the level of about €100 million at the moment, and we're hoping to get upwards of another €100 million into this next year.
And so we're addressing a range of the different risks. So it works like this.
We have all the satellite data, not just from ISA, but also from all the other space agencies we have for the different categories of objects.
We're looking at developing a range of different equities for reanalysis, for modelling and for services.
Now this is the way we looked at the fifties TVs and we said,
which of these are directly accessible by satellites in terms of just about more than half but
30 of them of those ISA had observations which were particularly relevant for not all of them.
But for some of them. And so we chose the ones which are in in yellow that in the first coat we've implemented the ones in green and
we're planning to implement the ones in blue as well in the next phase and the stage for the very sharp eyed,
you'll notice that there's, there's one down here for land surface temperature, a present that isn't the ECB.
It's been under debate for about ten years as to whether it should be along the list of climate variables.
And it's very likely to be in the next implementation plan.
And there's been a lot of debate about it, mostly because many of us have argued that nobody knows really what land surface temperature actually is.
Everybody has a different if you have 20 people in the room, you've got 30 different definitions of it, but no way of holding it on a definition,
which is to do with the radiant temperature of the radiant power coming from the land, which is what's important for driving climate.
So this is what's being done by ISA and in the two phases, which last the first one was up until about 2013.
We're in the middle of the second phase now. We've been looking at this suite of 40 of them all together.
And really the thing that's changed as we've progressed is, is not the list of increase,
but the period over which the measurements are being able to be made. So we're trying to extend to longer and longer periods,
ideally climate records and this sort of the liturgy says that they are 30 records which are needed for climate.
And clearly, if you haven't got 30 years and you have to make do with what you have, but you would like to have 30 years if you can.
So these are the results of these have been quoted in the the last assessment report of the IPCC, particularly in this year.
And there's one in particular which has been very important in that,
which is the ice sheets CCAR, which is being led by Andrew Shepherd from Leeds University.
And I'll show some examples of that now. We've also developed a number of for the science community in particular,
a number of different aspects of the programme which make the data much more easily accessible.
The whole suite of toolbox is there for people to be able to take the data and use them and visualisations.
And I'll show some animations in a moment and those are available as well,
so they can be downloaded and taken away and used in teaching or lecture courses or whatever.
So it wasn't just the datasets, it's also the accessibility and means of handling them.
So this is one example and it's taken from the the MBT Ice Mass Balance and the comparison experiment that was funded by ESA, CCI along with NASA.
And this is the one led by Andrew Shepherd.
And over the years, the last 20 years, there have been many different measurements of mass loss from Antarctica and from Greenland,
and they've been made from four different techniques or three and a half different
techniques grew imagery that is just simply weighing how much mass is there,
interferometry, which measures, how much mass is being lost by looking at the motions of ice coming off the ice sheet?
And then two different types of altimetry, either by laser or by radar oximetry, which is actually looking at the director photography,
the shape of the ice sheet rather precisely down to sort of centimetre sub centimetre level.
And over the years with different techniques showing different colours have given lots of different results and all in consistently each other.
And the strength of me was to take all these different results and to analyse how they were
produced and to come up with the best analysis of of over the last 20 years to what was going on.
Similarly for Greenland, we have slightly more measurements. I think the Greenland you can see these are not necessarily consistent with each other,
but like all the simulation techniques you take from each point you can and what you should come up with the best answer and this is what they found.
That's we've had a steady increase in the sea level contribution,
the rise in sea level coming from both Greenland and Antarctica over the last 20 years.
And it's it's increasing. So this is the total contribution you're seeing here.
So you'd expect it to increase, but the rate at which is increasing is also increasing.
So we're going from about a quarter of a millimetre back in 1990 to around the millimetre you have that.
So we are losing mass from the ice sheets more rapidly now than we were 20 years ago by a factor of about four.
So this is a nice is what this is going to be able to work.
And then problem my computer. The sports.
Readers of Apple and Macintosh are not quite what they used to.
This is a nice example, showing an animation of ice sheet transports from Greenland and from Antarctica.
This is primarily from the Interferometric method.
So what you're seeing here is the the right foot, which must have been lost from the primary glaciers on the boundaries of the.
In this case, the Greenland ice sheet. You see the losses coming all from the boundaries effectively.
What's happening is that the ice sheet is slowly moving out towards the ocean.
The centre is not decreasing. There's still accumulation in the centre.
In fact. Is your phone in your pocket?
All right. So.
Okay. Is that better? Yes. Sounds better to me.
So while you are watching this, I'm sure whilst I was talking and now you see the same thing happen in Antarctica.
In Antarctica, the situation is a bit more complicated.
The East Antarctic ice sheet, which is the main one you see on the towards the right of the screen, is pretty well stable.
There's not much happening there. It's a very, very slight loss, but almost within the error bars at zero.
And there is loss which is taking place from the Western Antarctic ice sheet and from a particular small number of areas in particular.
And these are the critical areas for I'm talking financial loss overall.
The loss from Greenland is greater than that from Antarctica.
Um, but it's a very complicated situation. There are different things happening in Antarctica as well.
And Pine Island is the area which is losing the greatest amount of mass know Antarctica.
I think you just about to get some numbers for that. Perhaps not.
Now you see the duplication of the slide I showed you a few moments ago.
Okay. So that's one.
So this is using the Interferometric method, you can actually measure the loss and this is just the same slide turned around north upwards.
And this shows the loss of mass through the glaciers.
Yeah. Moving downwards from the ice cap here down into the ocean to the west of Greenland.
And this is at a rate of metres per day. So we're up to something like 10 to 15 metres per day of the glaciers moving into the ocean.
So if we the benefit we have now of 20 years and more of observations from the
US one year as to when we sat more recent ascent one Pterosaur Rex and so on.
We can see here the evolution of the movement over the last 20 years or so from 1995,
with the arrest on the left through 2008 with the Japanese Alice Instrument and Pterosaur Rex and
the rate of increase of the ice speed and the mass loss has been increasing over that period,
as you can see. So we're able to measure this, the mass loss from the major ice sheets rather precisely.
And there's a second animation here which looks at 30 years worth of observations of soil moisture.
Again, this comes out of the soil moisture element of the climate change initiative of Easter,
and you're incorporating data from this whole range of satellites that you saw there,
about 15 different satellites starting off in the early eighties,
I think it is, or even late seventies with the passive microwave radiometer sensors,
which were carried by a series of American military and civilian satellites,
satellites, and then more recently with active solar systems scatter orbiters.
And then in the last couple of years with dedicated satellites looking at saw moisture.
So this just gives you the monthly averages and then will change in a moment to look at the anomalies, which is a bit more interesting.
So this is a three monthly running total running average of the anomaly against the mean and you see the seasonal behaviour,
but also you begin to pick up, you know, as time goes on you'll see it will identify particular events in different parts of the world and so on.
Watch. It is extremely important for all sorts of reasons,
not just because it's one of the the major factors governing agriculture and food production worldwide.
Apart from in Western Europe and some parts of North America,
agriculture worldwide is is essentially limited by the amount of water, which is in fact.
So it's water limited. So so much is the key parameter for the value of agriculture,
but also it's extremely important in terms of evapotranspiration and the energy balance and the whole aspect of the earth system.
So we now have 30 plus years with 40 years worth of improving measurements of soil moisture and able to identify specific events,
flooding and droughts in different areas around the world as time goes on.
So there are a number of these animations which are being made available on the website and uh,
they can be picked up and you can take them and use them yourself in presentations or in teaching or whatever.
If you wish. And it's put together by a company called Planetary Visions, which is based on in Bristol, uh, Media Company.
Okay. More recently, we're able for the first time to start measuring direct measurements of CO2 in space.
We were able to do that to some extent within business, but not very well.
This is the last. Just some data from a few months ago.
The first orbiting Carbon Observatory, OCO satellite was launched by NASA.
OCO one didn't go very far. It failed on launch, wound up in the ocean.
But OCO CO2 was launched last year and this is giving us the best observations of spatially differentiated CO2 measurements worldwide.
And here you see the the major emissions coming from both manmade and also natural emissions in the different areas.
This is clearly going to be something that's very important in the future, he says.
Developing something called carbon soft, which if it's selected in a few weeks time,
will fly in the early 2020s with a rather improved resolution both the radiometric
being and spatially and able to attract for the first time individual sources of CO2.
And these are clearly very important, not just for the physics of what's going on in the atmosphere,
but also for the politics of what's going in the atmosphere as well.
So this is a very important dataset. We talked earlier also about sea level rise and sea level has a number of different components.
It has a component due to the thermal expansion of the ocean,
due to mass loss from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and mass loss from the land glaciers as well,
which is substantial and also from the amount of water which is in the atmosphere or in groundwater.
And one could even see and if we look at this diagram,
it's a rather nice diagram which shows the correlation between El Nino events in the Pacific with land, water, groundwater storage and on land.
So what you're seeing here is the Time series going from 1997 through to 2012, and it's essentially a line drawn across the equator from west to east.
Yeah. And what happens to that line is in time.
So in 1998 we had the big El Nino event, which we're seen here, and that is correlated with a great deal of land water storage in the Amazon basin.
So we see an increase in land water then.
And similarly when we have the ninos we do of presence and have had for the last seven or eight years of being a series of ninos,
these are related to increase land water storage in Australia.
You have a decrease here or an increase here and that consequence of that increased land water storage,
particularly in the southern hemisphere, is what gave rise, if we remember to that dip in sea level in 2010 11.
This is caused by caused by the fact that we had so much water being stored on the land that it was taken out of the ocean.
So the amounts of water which are transported are so large that you actually see it in the decrease of the global sea level rise.
So these effects are extraordinarily powerful and really you hold them.
The due process is one that governs much of much of global climate.
It's also related to CO2 anomalies in the atmosphere as well.
And this is just to show that everything is linked to everything else.
So when you have El Nino years, then you have an increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
When you have flooding you, yes, you have a decrease.
It's to do with the fact you've got more vegetation in the northern hemisphere absorbing more CO2.
When you have a La Nina, have the other CCI components also measured a number of different other parameters about the the earth and the ECB.
So glacier inventories which are measured either by direct measurements of the two dimensional spread or by looking at the altimetry,
by measuring the topography directly,
using the digital elevation model, or by looking at displacement vectors, in other words,
seeing where the edge of the tail, the time of the glacier, and how is it progressing?
Time So these are all different methods of doing that. For the first time.
We're now able after the CCI to be able to measure all 170,000 glaciers within the range of glacier inventory,
many of which have never been measured before. So we have a complete inventory now of all the land glaciers worldwide and they
are a significant contribution to sea level rise comes from land glaciers.
They are extraordinarily important. So in a very large fraction,
over half the world's population is fed by water and based from on glaciers from the Himalayas and other high altitude areas and C and Arctic sea ice.
I'm sure you all very familiar with the expansion and contraction over the years of
Arctic sea ice and the general decrease that we've seen over the last 30 years or so.
And this is another way of looking at it, which is quite nice. This comes from the National Snow and Ice Data Centre website.
And what you see here is the annual decrease going from January through to December.
So you have northern winter and then the minimum comes in early September and then starts to increase again towards the towards the winter.
So the solid line in the. Middle. Yeah, is the average over 30 years between 1980 and 2010.
So that's the average cycle of the extent of sea ice in terms of square kilometre or millions of square kilometres.
And the grey area is plus or minus two sigma on that. And what I've done here is to highlight the last ten years worth of those of cycles.
And the minimum was the minimum minimum was in 2012, 2007, also in 2006.
But what you see is that the last ten years have all been well below the average and well outside the two sigma band four for most of those years.
And this is 2015 here which stops in May that so this is again, it's pretty well off the bottom.
So what we're seeing is this is this is zero floating sea ice in the Arctic.
And if we look at the trend of when this is likely, this continues to decrease and decrease, then we're looking at an ice free Arctic sometime around.
Well, originally people thought the middle of this century, but it's likely to be rather fast than that.
So sometime after 2030, that has lots of consequences.
Physical consequences changes the albedo,
the amount of energy which is reflected back into the back into the atmosphere and back into space from the Arctic
regions is clearly extremely different if you have very bright sea ice when albedo 4.8 or something of open water,
which has no idea about oh point nought 50.1. So it has enormous physical effects, but it has lots of social effects as well.
And this is the using satellite. Airborne satellite, yes.
Which is an automatic identification system for ships.
This is the pattern of polar shipping traffic in the summer of 2014, 20 years ago, that would have been completely white in this area.
The first government using satellite data to navigate through the ice was done in 1992 with the the ship,
the astrolabe, which was fed with data from here us one. But these are a few explorers tracks and so on across the actual pole.
But most of this is commercial shipping now, which is able to cut something like this 50 or 60% of its distance between, well, say, London,
Rotterdam and Yokohama or whatever, by going across the north eastern passage,
well through the Northwest Passage, rather than having to go all the way around.
Okay, they can't get through the Suez Canal. So it has lots of effects in terms of in terms of society as well.
And of course, this is opening up exploration.
The area in Greenland now is the Chinese are building airstrips up here and giving all sorts of wonderful things to the local Greenland population.
And Greenland is becoming much more valuable as a source of rare earth elements in particular than it was in the past.
And this is clearly going to have the Barents Sea up here is one of the most important areas for potential hydrocarbon exploration in the world.
And everybody is now fighting and trying to plant their flag at the bottom of the North Pole,
as you remember, perhaps two years ago, a Russian submarine.
So that's going to be fine as well. And it was interesting that I had a quote from the American admiral who is responsible for the Pacific fleet,
who regarded the biggest threat to peace in the Pacific,
not the fact that China was building for the first time ever, a deep water fleet, deep water navy.
It's never had before. It's not building one. He didn't regard that as a bigger threat as climate change in the Arctic to security in the Pacific,
though I've talked up until now about the CCI and the OECD and the fact that they were essentially there to,
uh, understand, model and predict what's going on in climate.
But also there are aspects of satellite data which are important for mitigation and adaptation.
One aspect of mitigation is REDD reduced emission from deforestation and forest degradation.
And this is a scheme whereby some rich countries pay countries with forests not to chop that forest down.
And so one program which I've been involved with is something called the Global Forest Observation Initiative,
and this is a program which helps provide satellite observations along with the necessary technologies and expertise,
skills, algorithms and so on to countries who are developing their national monitoring, reporting inventory systems for payments on the road.
So basically, if they don't cut their forests down, then rich countries pay them the equivalent income that they would have had.
And so this is an important use of satellite data.
It's using 2013 and 2014.
This is the coverage that we've been getting of all the tropical forest countries in that time.
It's been running now for seven or eight years. So we provide data.
We provide method and guidance approved by the World Bank.
By the unofficial policy, by the IPCC Inventories Bureau, etc. So it's a highly political activity as well as a technical one,
capacity building and then delivery of the systems through Food and Agricultural Organisation, Clinton Foundation, World Bank and others.
So just the sorts of things you can do is this is an example of what you can do from satellites with forests.
So this is using data from L band 20 centimetre radar.
So looking at this is a map in Kamchatka and actually in eastern eastern Siberia and this
is a map of coherence and that can be translated into a map of forest and forest change.
And if we look at this little area up here, it's blown up over here.
You can see what you have here is areas which are forest, which are still forest.
These are areas which have never been forest. These are areas which have been cut down and these are areas of regrowth.
And it's if you all you want to do is to measure forest change, then you can do that pretty easily from space.
We're hoping with a project called Biomass, which will launch for a much longer wavelength than 80 centimetre wavelength radar in 2020,
to be able to model much more precisely the structure of the canopy and to get a much more
direct assessment of the standing biomass than simply by looking at forest and non forest.
So that's a project which is being led by Sean Quiggin from Sheffield University.
He's the principal investigator for it. Another nice example of what you can do,
and this is something that Barry knows all about this using Interferometric data for monitoring manmade infrastructures and in this case,
the the [INAUDIBLE] in the Netherlands.
So in 1953, this is an example of a devastating event which occurred on the East Coast of England and also in the Netherlands,
a combination of weather and tides. So that was a serious, very serious flooding caused by a number of different techniques,
if you like, over here on the right, as a result of which we have.
The [INAUDIBLE] system in the Netherlands was very much reinforced. And this is what you have there now in this 170,000 kilometres of water barriers.
So very difficult to measure to routinely monitor.
So this but it can be done from space.
And so this is taking a series of radar interferometric images and using a technique called point source in Sampson.
So you can measure the very small displacements on these [INAUDIBLE] in time.
And we're talking about displacements of a few millimetres a year,
but you can do that over a period of ten years and you can do it for every point along the [INAUDIBLE] system.
So this gives you the sort of information that you could get from local satellite mapping,
but you're getting it for 100 kilometres per 100 kilometres at a time.
So it's a very cost effective way of doing it.
And based on this information and based on predictions of climate change, the Netherlands, the it's very interesting.
The Royal Rights Volunteer Stop,
the Royal Water Management Organisation has changed their policy for the way they manage [INAUDIBLE] for the next hundred years and
they've invested an extra €50 billion in raising their [INAUDIBLE] by an extra metre above what they had planned to do 20 years ago.
So the results of predictions of climate and this sort of information has had a massive effect on the way that the Netherlands invests.
And it's why somebody once said there's no such thing as land in the Netherlands.
It's just dehydrated sea. And this is a way of keeping it dehydrated.
So where are we? That's some examples of where of what we've been able to do with satellite data from in Eastern and elsewhere.
And this is just an overview of the overall ISA program at present.
So we started off back in the 1970s with the very first video set, minutes at one.
Then we had the US one in the US too, and then that.
But at the same time we've now this was when we developed the concept of the envelope program in ISA,
which would allow a much more coherent future planning for future missions.
And this has evolved into three main families of missions now.
So we have the research missions. So I talked about biomass.
This is the P band Radar. We have Earth Care and Illness, which are both atmospheric missions which will fly in the next few years.
We also have a much more sophisticated range of missions now being flown in conjunction with the US, sent back from the original media site.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. She took us up to about 2002, the second generation of Mediasite,
and we were in the middle of those now about to launch the fourth, the fourth in that series.
And we're now developing the third generation images of video set for geostationary orbit.
This will take us out to around 20, 2040, 2035, 2040.
We also have developed polar orbiting which vertical satellites for the first time we've met up in 2004 I think it was.
And that's we're now developing the second generation of those which are.
Take us out again to 2035. Perhaps even more importantly or dramatically has been the advent of the so-called Sentinel series,
and these came from the agreement with the European Union to provide long term commitment to environmental monitoring from space.
So they evolved from essentially the research missions from back here.
And we now have a total of six different series of central emissions for missions and each.
So Sentinel one A-1, b1c, one DS. We have guaranteed repeat delivery of in-space campaign capability with all of these to
give us again 30 years worth of guaranteed monitoring of the environment from space.
This is really an extraordinary achievement, I think, to persuade the European Union to spend about €8 billion on this.
And we continue to build the experimental research innovation missions over here as part of the budget.
So we've gone from the old every five years to this whole range of different missions now.
It's been a tremendous success in the last 25 years or so.
So coming back to looking back at the Earth and this is a bit more speculative and coming back to the idea of of communication.
I've been working with these two guys over here, David Victor and Charles.
Colonel Charles kind of used to be the director of Earth Observation NASA now and then he was director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The higher David Victor is they're looking at know we have this vacuum in the public debate at present.
And the discussion this morning actually was quite interesting with Keyshawn talking about what's
happening with the hiatus and the poor old public is being presented with this one number.
And it's a bit, like I said before,
you stick a thermometer in the bowels of the earth and you're supposed to be able to tell from that whether it's got athlete's foot nor lung cancer.
And it's not enough. And we need to have a much better, if only for the purposes of communication.
We need to have a much better way of describing what's going on in the Earth system.
Now we've got 50 CVS, which are great at what the scientists need.
They are rather specific technical parameters that needed to understand what's happening in the Earth system.
They're very good.
Some of them are quite straightforward, like sea level rise and quite easily understood, but others are extremely abstruse and complex.
And you need to have five pages of text of note to understand, to explain why they're important.
So I think we need to think about some other indicators, some vital signs, the things that you can look at.
If the Earth were a patient in the hospital bed, what would be on the floor of their bed?
Wouldn't be their blood. It's blood pressure, it's temperature. But you would like to see something which gave you a quick snapshot about what's
the state of the earth in order to make people understand what's going on.
They're completely confused about the idea of whether there is a temperature rise or not.
Even scientists this morning we were unable to explain in simple words what that meant.
We saw that happening just this morning. And so we need to I think I think and this is something as I said,
I was in Geneva this week and I happened to bump into the guy who's the director of communications for the IPCC,
and I started talking to him about this.
It's very interesting because the IPCC has just realised that they really need to communicate what they're doing better.
So they're opening up a workshop and having a seminar to think about ideas for the future,
because really we're spectacularly bad at this fantastically by some believable barrier.
I don't understand why. Because scientists are not incoherent. They're not bad communicators per say when some are, but some are not.
There's no reason why we should be so bad at it.
And yet we've still failed to get over the message that something is happening this earth, and it's not a matter of opinion.
So we need a better communication. We need a better dialogue. The 50 kvs are too complicated.
There's too many of them. I don't understand. Half of them just taking one number is simplistic and misleading,
and you end up having lots of arguments with people about whether it's happening or not.
So I think we need to find half a dozen or something like that.
Key parameters which would show what's happening to the Earth's system,
which would be easily understood long term measurements, reliable, non-controversial, objective.
You know, I don't know whether you can ever tell politicians anything they don't want to hear,
but at least they have less excuse for ignoring it if we gave them better information.
And as I say, this isn't an all original idea.
If you go to actually the best web pages, the NOA web page for climate talks, which has a very nice suite of these things on it.
But again, it's a bit like the argument about these TVs. 20 years ago, there wasn't one list of OECD.
Everybody had their own pet list, which was defined differently. What we need is to have a more coherent approach to doing this.
And so this is my list, which is not very original. So you surface temperature because you can't get away from that.
We've been talking to people about it for 30 years. If we stop now, then we'll just be accused of picking winners.
You can't ignore atmospheric CO2. That's what it's all about in the first system.
Ocean Health. He content is probably the most important and I'll say something about that in a minute.
That's my favourite sea level is sea level rise is tremendous because it's an integration of many different aspects of climate change,
the oceans warming, mass loss, rise from the from glaciers and from the ice sheets and so on.
So all these things have the same effect in the same direction on sea level.
So it's very good for that. Solar Irradiance total.
Solar Irradiance because we need to demonstrate that that hasn't changed radically over this period, which it hasn't.
Then you get the ones which are not so sure about stratospheric ozone.
I'm not so sure that's some arguments as to whether this is a good contra indicator of climate change or not.
But I think you're beginning to get a bit complicated that this is a nice one,
the number of three sigma hydro meteorological events a year, because most of these things don't change on a daily basis.
You don't wake up in the morning and look at the thing. So it's sea level still rising.
Yesterday's and then tomorrow. Is it still rising? It's going to rise.
You need to measure that once a year or demonstrate it once a year. But things like this, a number of three sigma, some number of major hurricanes,
typhoons, flood events, that's something which changes on a weekly basis at least.
And that's something that you could actually covers a consistent indicator.
Then there are others. Ice sheet, mass balance. We've already seen land glaciers, so but we need to find some less that we can agree on.
Now, the problem with surface temperature, this is taken from the call paper that they discussed this morning.
And basically what he was saying is that this was the accepted view in the past,
that if you look at what the IPCC was saying, then the rate of temperature increases has decreased between 1951 to 2012.
So it's less now than it was then. If you look at the way these temperatures are calculated.
And what Carl was saying this morning is that the if you look at the global mean that in fact,
there's been no change in the rate of increase of temperature over the last 70 years.
And in fact, it's slightly, very slightly accelerating.
So if you look over the last 15 years, this apparent hiatus in surface temperature increase is actually doesn't exist at all.
It's all to do with the calibration of bucket measurements of surface temperature, sea temperature,
coupled with measurements made on the inlet to exhaust manifolds, which is where most measurements of 89 ships.
The difference between the calibration of body temperatures with ship temperatures and the distribution of of surface
temperature measurements on the land into regions where we didn't have as many measurements in the past in Africa,
Central Asia in particular. But this still doesn't take into account the fact we have a very badly distributed set of measurements.
We have nothing, almost nothing of the Arctic, which is actually increasing the most rapidly of all.
So there's a bias in here against increase in T already.
So even though but you see this is an argument we still because we only have this one indicator
this was suddenly big news this morning and there's a debate about it all over again.
We need to have more than that. So I said my favourite was Ocean Heat Content.
I'll just take a moment to explain why this is the most important diagram in the whole of the IPCC fifth assessment report.
I managed now to persuade Thomas Stocker, who is the lead author, but it is as well.
Now he uses it whenever he goes everywhere.
This is the total energy system of the earth increasing over the last 50 years, sometimes called the ocean heat content.
It's truly the earth system heat content. But because 95% of it is in the ocean, it's almost the same thing.
So it's a number of things that you can see about this. First of all, it's increasing.
Nothing is flattening off. Yeah, there's no hiatus.
This is going you have a bit of a blip here with the El Nino event in 1998, but otherwise you have a nice,
constant, monotonic, almost regular linear increase in the total energy system.
So nothing stopping. This is also the content.
This is the energy content. This is not a symptom of the energy content, which is surface temperature.
This is what generates climate change. So it's the fundamental physics of what's going on in the system is what you see here.
Okay, so the first thing is it's increasing. The second thing to notice is the error bars pretty small.
There's no doubt about the fact it's increasing. The third thing to notice is the magnitude.
Here. You see the increase over the last 50 years has been about 250, a bit more.
Zeta-Jones Rosetta Joules is 10 to 21 joules. What does that mean?
The total energy generated by mankind, by nuclear power, fossil fuels, renewables, transport, anything else is about half.
Is that a Julia? In other words, the earth is warming up by ten times the amount of energy that mankind generates.
And the next thing to understand about this sort of notice is where the energy is going.
Most of it goes in the upper ocean between nought and 700 metres.
That's that's what the upper ocean means. This is the ocean between 702,000 metres below 2000 metres.
We don't really know what's going on because we have almost no measurements there.
But probably any change there is going to be even slower than in the 2000 metre ocean.
So probably not changing very much. This is so you can see that 90%,
95% of the energy is going into warming up the ocean because that's where the interaction to the atmosphere and the system is easiest.
Then the rest of it goes into the ice and cryosphere.
So this is the heating of the ice sheets shelves.
Then the bit goes into the land. Then down at the bottom, there's a bit. Just about the thickness of the pencil line is the atmosphere.
And this is what we're using to tell everybody about how much climate is changing.
You must be crazy. This is the last thing you use.
It's a bit like seeing the top inch of a dog's tail walking past a window and somebody saying, Well, tell me what sort of dog that was.
You've got almost no information on the atmosphere.
And if you're using this as a key thing to discuss with the community, we should be using this diagram needs a bit of explanation.
But it's it's also has the benefit of generating the physics of what's happening in climate, not being a consequence of it.
So that's why I feel passionately about this diagram. It's the most interesting thing in the whole of our five.
So I think I'll stop. There's just one thing I'd like to mention, and that's that we are about to launch a massively open online course on climate.
It starts on June the eighth from Monday. It's been put together by I'm not sure who to a whole bunch of people this company Imperative Space.
They've been doing the modules by all sorts of people, even people from Oxford, Matt Disney from UCL.
Andrew Shepherd's the guy who talked about the ice sheets in Leeds. Angela Benedetti from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast.
It's not just half dozen people, it's dozens and dozens and you can sign up for that at that website at the top here,
or your students can sign up for it and you can take that and get a better understanding of what's going on.
I think that's it. Okay. Thanks very much.