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Climate Monitoring Station Proposed on the Moon

Posted by Zonk on from the to-the-moon-data dept.

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."

4 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. expensive? by crunzh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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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  2. hindsight by perlchild · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. We've got something sitting here ready to go up by LordVader717 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Instead of watching us, why not watch the moon? by Angelwrath · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.