New satellite set to launch this year will make the most accurate sea level measurements yet – or so they claim – Anthony
Credits: Airbus
From NASA Goddard:
Once the state-of-the-art Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite launches in November, it will collect the most accurate data yet on sea level — a key indicator of how Earth’s warming climate is affecting the oceans, weather and coastlines. But first, engineers need to ensure that the spacecraft can survive the rigors of launch and of operating in the harsh environment of space. That’s where meticulous testing comes in.
At the end of May, engineers finished putting the spacecraft — which is being built in Germany — through a battery of tests that began in November 2019. “If it can survive all the abuse we deliberately put it through on the ground, then it’s ready for space,” said John Oswald, the mission’s deputy project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich spacecraft is a part of the Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS (Continuity of Service) mission, a joint U.S.-European effort in which two identical satellites will be launched five years apart. The spacecraft will join the Copernicus constellation of satellites that constitutes the European Union’s Earth Observation Programme. Once in orbit, each satellite will collect sea level measurements down to the centimeter for 90% of the world’s oceans. The data will add to almost 30 years of information gathered by an uninterrupted series of joint U.S.-European satellites, creating an unprecedented — and unbroken — 40-year sea level dataset. The spacecraft will also measure the temperature and humidity of Earth’s atmosphere, which can be used to help improve weather forecasts and hurricane predictions.
These measurements are important because the oceans and atmosphere are tightly connected. “We’re changing our climate, and the clearest signal of that is the rising oceans,” said Josh Willis, the mission’s project scientist at JPL. “More than 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is going into the ocean.” That heat causes seawater to expand, accounting for about one-third of the global average of modern-day sea level rise. Meltwater from glaciers and ice sheets account for the rest.
The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite sits in front of a testing chamber where mission team members tested whether the spacecraft could endure the loud sounds it will encounter during launch.Credits: Airbus
“For climate science, what we need to know is not just sea level today, but sea level compared to 20 years ago. We need long records to do climate science,” said Willis.
Six scientific instruments are key to that task. Two of them will work in concert to measure the distance from the satellite to the ocean’s surface. That information — combined with data from three other instruments that precisely establish the satellite’s position in orbit and a sixth that will measure vertical slices of the atmosphere for temperature and humidity — will help determine sea levels around the world.
Put Through Their Paces
To ensure that the scientific instruments will work once they get into space, engineers sent the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich to a testing facility near Munich and ran the satellite through a gauntlet starting in November 2019.
First up: the vibration test, where the engineers subjected the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite to the kinds of shaking it will experience while attached to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasting into orbit. Then in December, engineers tested the spacecraft in a big vacuum chamber and exposed it to the extreme temperatures that it will encounter in space, ranging from 149 to minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit (65 to minus 180 degrees Celsius).
The next two trials took place in late April and May. The acoustics test, performed in April, made sure the satellite could withstand the loud noises that occur during launch. Engineers placed the spacecraft in a roughly 1,000-square-foot (100-square-meter) chamber outfitted with enormous speakers. Then they blasted the satellite with four 60-second bursts of sound, with the loudest peaking around 140 decibels. That’s like standing next to a jet’s engine as the plane takes off.
Finally, in the last week of May, engineers performed an electromagnetic compatibility test to ensure that the sensors and electronics on the satellite wouldn’t interfere with one another, or with the data collection. The mission uses state-of-the-art instruments to make precise measurements, so the smallest interference could compromise that data.
Normally, JPL engineers would help to conduct these tests in person, but two of the trials took place after social-distancing safety measures had been established due to the coronavirus pandemic. So team members worked out a system to support their counterparts in Germany remotely.
To account for the nine-hour time-zone difference, engineers in California pulled shifts from midnight to 10 a.m. for several weeks, consulting with colleagues in Germany through phone calls, video conferences, chat rooms and text messages. “It was confusing sometimes, keeping all the channels and groups going at the same time in the middle of the night, but I was impressed with our team,” said Oswald.
The upshot of all that effort? “The tests are complete and the preliminary results look good,” Oswald said. Team members will spend the next several weeks completing the analysis of the test results and then preparing the satellite for shipment to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California for launch this fall.
About the Mission
Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS is being jointly developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with funding support from the European Commission and support from France’s National Centre for Space Studies (CNES).
The first Sentinel-6/Jason-CS satellite that will launch was named after the former director of NASA’s Earth Science Division, Michael Freilich. It will follow the most recent U.S.-European sea level observation satellite, Jason-3, which launched in 2016 and is currently providing data.
NASA’s contributions to the Sentinel-6 mission are three of the science instrument payloads for each of the two Sentinel-6 satellites, including the Advanced Microwave Radiometer, the Global Navigation Satellite System – Radio Occultation, and the Laser Reflector Array. NASA is also contributing launch services for those satellites, ground systems supporting operation of the JPL-provided science instruments, the science data processors for two of these instruments, and support for the international Ocean Surface Topography Science Team.
To learn more about NASA’s study of sea level rise, visit:
What a waste of money. Man’s preoccupation with his importants in the universe. We are so powerful we can impact the earth’s climate. Get a grip guys.
“We’re changing our climate, and the clearest signal of that is the rising oceans,” said Josh Willis,
Just so you know who Josh Willis is:
The Jason data averages to 3.2 mm/yr.
Which means 1 metre in 300 years give or take.
In 300 years a workman could build a 1 km levee bank 1 metre high using a teaspoon.
This hysteria is so stupid.
It would take 7 years for sea level rise at 3.2mm/a to equal the recommended thickness of a layer of Tarmac. So if we resurface our coastal roads every 7 years our coastal communities would be protected. Thats how ridiculous this really is. Where my family have lived for the last 58 years (within 100m of the Sussex beach here in the UK) There is no discernable difference in the low water mark of a very flat shallow beach. 185mm – 7.5″ should have made a significant impact on this line but hasnt even though we are told that Sussex is also sinking slightly because of the weight of ice over Scotland still having an effect on the tectonic plate we sit on.
From my own observations alone then I call b/s on sea level rise.
Really, save the taxpayer, don’t launch the satellite (say you did) and make up whatever numbers fit the narrative.
That’s what they’ll be doing anyway.
I don’t mind fairytales, just as long as they don’t cost me anything!
Sea level rise isn’t the problem…it likely never WILL be the problem within a single generation. It’s the local apparent sea level rise as compared to construction that is the problem. It doesn’t matter if the sea is rising or the currents are changing or the land is sinking – it all affects the local apparent sea level rise.
So you make actual measurements where it could be of concern and then plan your construction accordingly for the future. Wow, that was hard.
The average level of the ocean is not important except to certain scientists. And I STILL cannot see how they measure anything useful when there are waves chopping about and underwater currents that pile water up locally. It’s more of a guessing game to try to get a detailed picture from fuzzy data unless they ONLY measure areas that are flat – no wind or waves.
Robert of Texas
Wind piling up water, changes in barometric pressure changing water height, waves and tides, plus a satellite that changes altitude because of differences in gravity around the globe (influenced additionally by changes in the water column), and therefore the altitude has to be estimated over oceans with a gravity model that has a spatial resolution that is much coarser than the areas being measured with a laser.
A claim of measuring to 1 cm sounds like a hoped for precision for any particular measurement, taking into account all the system variations, with an unknown accuracy as a result of all the transient variations in water height.
They are measuring the distance between the satellite and the ocean surface with an accuracy of 1cm.
However, do they know the height of the satellite to within 1cm?
Next thing you know they might discover the ocean. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01601-4
Mountain height might be controlled by tectonic force, rather than erosion.
“This finding indicates that mountain ranges are close to force equilibrium and that their height is primarily controlled by the megathrust shear force. We conclude that temporal variations in mountain height reflect long-term changes in the force balance but are not indicative of a direct climate control on mountain elevation.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2340-7
I doubt it!
For some reason it feels like that satellite looks like an old Bang and Oleson stereo I has in the 80’s
I’m interested in the measurements of the air and humidity. It sounds like we may finally be able to get a true measure of energy in the atmosphere.
The moment you average data over a distance it becomes anecdotes.
The satellites don’t actually see “sea level” they see wave velocity.
Its like the old quantum problem but you’re trying to determine what breed of horse by the rifle you’re using.
“The moment you average data over a distance it becomes anecdotes.”
err no.
a spatial average is a prediction. testable prediction.
Except it is rarely tested fools just seem to assume it’s always valid to do it.
I’d really feel a lot better about this project if someone other than Josh Willis was in charge. As he proved with the ARGO float data, if he doesn’t like the remote sensing data the satellite returns, he’ll delete or adjust the parts he doesn’t like until his paymasters are happy. He can easily milk a millimeter or two of SLR out of any data this thing sends, and create a trend that he can claim is unprecedented, even though the big ice sheets are gone and the sea rose 120 meters as they melted, just 20 thousand to 10 thousand years ago. Once the alarming trend is accomplished, he’ll be happy, the paymasters are happy, Michael Mann and Al Gore are happy, and they’ll all go to some exotic locale and drink Mai Tais as they talk it over on our dime. But poor school children the world over will be wetting their pants out of fear.
The oceans? What’s to know? They’re big, they’re wet, and I live a thousand miles from the nearest one. Last year, sea level surged upwards by three millimeters. I’m not worried.
Listen, do you think that story about Noah and the Ark is true? What do you suppose people’s sins were that God decided to drown everybody- sins that were worse than anything we’ve seen in recorded history, and which haven’t been seen since the Flood?
https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-6
https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/missions/sentinel-6/heritage
https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/missions/sentinel-6/instrumental-payload
huge bonus
SENTINEL-6 products shall provide bending angle and refractivity profiles from radio occultation observations to infer information on atmospheric temperature and humidity for weather and climate.
This takes advantage of the typical JASON orbit to deliver radio occultation with original time and space sampling
radio occultation??
What the heck does that mean? What is occultating what?
Perhaps NOAA and NASA covering up actual results?
They’re dealing with the occult? When did witchcraft become a standard tool of the climate scientists?
“ What if NASA’s new ocean satellite finds sea level rise isn’t the problem it’s touted to be?”
Easy, Gavin Schmidt will just make sh-t up.
They could save all the expense of ruggedness testing by simply mailing the satellite somewhere via the US Postal Service. If it survives that, it will survive anything.
It is absolutely necessary to have this new satellite. It will allow to “adjust” down old satellite readings which will allow to continue claiming that it is worse than we thought because it will exagerate current sea level rise regardless of any disagreement with tide gauges, which are, as you know, irrelevant.
/sarc
We know that Topex and Jason measures systematically differ from groundbased tidal gauges. (For the North Atlantic the satellites say about 3mm/yr, the gauges say 1.9 mm/yr.) The difference has never been explained but must be a systematic bias in the data processing. Therefore, if the data processing for his new mission is based on that from the earlier ones, we can expect more of the same.
I for one will only believe what comes out of the mission if the data processing train has been built from scratch, with the really vital stuff about the calibrations and corrections done in twofold by two completely independent teams of developers (which are not even allowed to talk to each other). Needles to say with the software fully documented and publicly available for independent scrutiny.
This has to be the mother-of-all “no schist Sherlock” phrases…
The give away is that Willis says that the satellite was built to measure the sea level “rise”.
He should have said “to measure the sea level”.
Bob
Unfortunately, what he said may have been very accurate. The satellite WILL find what it was built to find! Come Hell or high water.
From the article: “These measurements are important because the oceans and atmosphere are tightly connected. “We’re changing our climate, and the clearest signal of that is the rising oceans,” said Josh Willis, the mission’s project scientist at JPL.”
A ridiculous statement. There is no evidence “we’re” changing the Earth’s climate, and rising oceans are certainly not anything like a “clear signal” of such.
This is an assertion not supported by any evidence. Typical for modern-day alarmist climate science. All they have are unsubstantiated assertions. That’s not evidence. That’s not scientific. And this guy is the project scientist. Oy! As Charles says.
I saw some rather alarming statistics a while back about tin cans and bits of debris currently flying around in orbit.
Out of 5000 odd satellites there was at least 3000 not even working.
Why don’t we ever have a plan to clean up after ourselves?
Shouldn’t it be an obligatory part of the mission statement?
Modern satellites are supposed to be able to de-orbit themselves when the mission is finished.
Older satellites did not always include this feature. Other satellites stopped communicating with the ground before they could be ordered to de-orbit.
From 14,000 BP to 6,000 BP there were advances and retreats of the sea level that far outweighed the current gentle rise that has bee going on since 6,000 BP (Fairbridge, 1960). If you happen to be wandering around Bremer Bay, WA you can come across elevated heavy mineral sands reflecting a sea level 2 metres above the current. It will be interesting when the sea level gets back to that position
Steven Mosher June 16, 2020 at 9:18 pm
Steven, you know me … I tend to check claims like yours. So I wrote to Roy Spencer and asked if they were true.
His reply was:
In other words, EVERY SINGLE THING YOU SAID ABOUT UAH WAS UNTRUE! Not just an error here and there. Every single one was untrue.
And you wonder why people tend to point and laugh when you show up … you gonna apologize to Spencer & Christie for libeling their good names as scientists?
w.
Willis E.: Thank you for doing that work. My guess- Mr. Mosher will not reply here, instead he’ll post these same claims down the road. If ever he responds to posts like yours, he’ll double down and say, UAH admits it doesn’t post raw data (without explaining where it is posted, at NOAA).
Willis
Another reason for Mosher’s drive-by remarks! If they are so terse as to be inscrutable, then no one can check the veracity. Thus, he can feel smug and not worry that anyone will call him on his inaccurate remarks.
I am pretty sure that the agreed upon results have already been included in the paper that will announce the results to the world at a future date whenever it seems believable.