Cisco, NASA Plan 'Planetary Skin' For Monitoring Earth Climate

Slatterz writes "Cisco has inked a deal with NASA to build a new global system for tracking climate change. Dubbed 'Planetary Skin,' the network platform will connect a number of sensor and recording units throughout the planet in an effort to gather data for monitoring and tracking changes to the global climate. The company plans to begin building the system next year with a program called 'Rainforest Skin' which will track both climate change and deforestation in rainforest environments. Eventually, the company plans to take the system throughout the planet and create a global network of data-collecting systems for the project. A podcast and a video explain the project in further detail."

Comments

Re:Re-calibrate?

[Yacoby]

We will then have to attempt to understand why the ice caps are melting and the world isn't heating up.

Urban heat island's and GIGO.

[TapeCutter]

"Let's not forget about the sensors that are already near black asphalt parking lots, tar covered rooftops, and down wind from a rooftop heat exchanger. Remember all you climatologists. In the world of computing, it's garbage in, garbage out.

Those silly climatologists have a name for it, it's called the Urban Heat Island, they have known about it for decades. Here is an embedded movie (scroll down a bit past the still picture) from Japan's Earth simulator. It shows the garbage that emeges from the physical and chemical equations in their high resolution finite element models, the garbage comes complete with jet-streams and cyclones forming in the right places.