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Climate Monitoring Station Proposed on the Moon
CryogenicKeen writes with the news that a University of Michigan study indicates the perfect place to monitor Earth's climate system would be the surface of the moon. The side facing us is a perfect location to monitor temperatures and weather patterns here on our planet, and a UM paper proposes an international effort to deploy monitoring stations on Earth's natural satellite. "On the near side of the airless moon, where Apollo 15 landed, surface temperature is controlled by solar radiation during daytime and energy radiated from Earth at night. Huang showed that due to an amplifying effect, even weak radiation from Earth produces measurable temperature changes in the regolith. Further, his revisit of the data revealed distinctly different characteristics in daytime and nighttime lunar surface temperature variations. This allowed him to uncover a lunar night-time warming trend from mid-1972 to late 1975, which was consistent with a global dimming of Earth that occurred over the same period and was due to a general decrease of sunlight over land surfaces."
Sounds really expensive, isn't there some way to use the money better or do we really need all that new data? We could, like sped the money on CO2 reductions or developing green technology.
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He's proving a correlation, which means that knowing what happened, he found clues that it would...
How can he be so sure that if we gather the clues, we'll come to the right conclusion? We have lots of data about climate, so much we usually can't tell what will happen, how is this different? Is it really that tied to radiation? Couldn't we measure radiation straight in the atmosphere? Do we already do so? Can we take multiple measurements to isolate local conditions?
Putting stuff on the moon is a romantic notion that appeals to a lot of people, but we should keep it as a last resort.
We've had this baby ready to launch for years, but for some mysterious reason NASA is having trouble doing anything with climate research. All they need to do is strap it on a DELTA IV rocket.
Would they be looking especially for lunar cooling at "night" on the moon? Because it has no atmosphere and no sunlight when dark, they say that the temperature of the side nearest the Earth is controlled by radiation from Earth. Would that mean global warming would cause it to be cooler, since the greenhouse effect causes that radiation to be reflected back to Earth?
From dictionary.com, dark can mean "hidden; secret."
Until the space age, that's exactly what the non-Earth-facing side of the moon was: hidden from view.
I admit it is a bit confusing when any given part of what was once the "dark side of the moon" spends half of each orbit in bright sunlight.
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You are correct that it would be very expensive, if you had a mission to the moon with this as the sole goal of the entire mission. So they should talk to India about including this as part of India's moon shots. I assume India wants to land on the Earth facing side, too, so this could ride down along with the robot from a few articles ago.
I would suggest, in addition to watching the Earth for climate change, that we also watch other planets. I've read recently that some research points to part of the climate change problem being the sun itself. Why don't we send weather monitoring stations to Mars as well, and see if the temperature is rising on other planets?
If we're going to monitor our own planet, we should have some objective evidence from other planets as well.
This has been discussed here. The moon is not the right place to do this. (why should it be down in another gravity well?) The right place is where DSCOVR aka Triana is to be placed.
The location for that is L1 (Lagrange-1), the neutral gravity point between the Sun and the Earth. That location will always view a sunlight earth.
FYI, one reason that Triana was not actually launched was that it was proposed by vice president at the time Al Gore. (Some wanted to call it GoreSat)
If you really need to be at the lunar distance to monitor climate you should station the instruments at L4 and L5. It takes a lot less energy deploy instruments there than landing on the moon. Solar eclipses are less frequent, etc. You would think that the scientist would have had this figured out before he went public.
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The funny bit is that the Apollo ALSEP stations would have done the job perfectly except they were switched off after the Apollo program finished.
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