NASA Voyage To Explore Link Between Sea Saltiness and Climate

DevotedSkeptic sends this excerpt from NASA: "A NASA-sponsored expedition is set to sail to the North Atlantic's saltiest spot to get a detailed, 3-D picture of how salt content fluctuates in the ocean's upper layers and how these variations are related to shifts in rainfall patterns around the planet. The research voyage is part of a multi-year mission, dubbed the Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS), which will deploy multiple instruments in different regions of the ocean. ... They will return with new data to aid in understanding one of the most worrisome effects of climate change — the acceleration of Earth's water cycle. As global temperatures go up, evaporation increases, altering the frequency, strength, and distribution of rainfall around the planet, with far-reaching implications for life on Earth."

Comments

Isn't this more NOAA's job?

[Anonymous Coward]

With NASA crying that it doesn't have enough money, why is it trying to do something that is probably NOAA's job?

Typical bureaucrats- gotta do anything to build their empires.

Note: I'm not saying this isn't good science to do, just that it's someone else's job.

Re:Isn't this more NOAA's job?

[ApplePy]

That's crazy talk. Everyone knows that NASA is National Aeronautics and Space Agency, and NOAA is National Ocean--

Never mind. :-)

Re:Isn't this more NOAA's job?

[Trepidity]

NASA has an interesting historical discussion of that question. The division of labor used to be that NASA flew the observational satellites, while NOAA and NWS did the ground-based work and data analysis. That makes some sense to me, but NASA says that by the 1970s this wasn't working (partly due to budget cuts), so NASA was given authority to run entire programs focused on earth analysis in an in-house manner, including both satellite and ground-based elements. NASA's first major program under that new mission description was the ozone-hole monitoring program, started in 1979.

Re:Isn't this more NOAA's job?

[Trintech]

Goto the site and click Overview > Sponsors. You will see that, while NASA is the one carrying out the mission, its sponsored (ie funded) by several divisions of the NOAA and NSF, etc so think of it more as NASA is being contracted to do this research and not a whole lot is coming directly out of their own budget.

Re:Isn't this more NOAA's job?

[fustakrakich]

...it's someone else's job.

"It's not my job" is the last thing I want to hear from a bureaucrat... Blurring the lines between the various departments doesn't sound like a bad thing to me. We should encourage the sharing of resources.

Re:Farmers

[Trepidity]

If you're close to Canada (e.g. North Dakota) things may be different; I was thinking of the more southern parts of the current American farm belt, like Kansas. I can't seem to find the map I had in mind, though; I've seen a map projecting how the wheat belt would shift with global warming, and it basically moves northwards, so more parts of Saskatchewan and Alberta become farming regions, but some of the southern part of the current wheat region becomes too hot/dry.

Re:Farmers

[tlhIngan]

As others mention below, the end result (if predictions are accurate, which is by no means guaranteed) is that the grain belt shifts northward into areas that aren't currently suitable for it, with the idea being that we don't really lose much staple crop farming capacity. While my organization focuses its efforts on soil reparative and water storage techniques which would mitigate such a situation, we don't see it as the Armageddon-level event predicted by the more strident GW acolytes. There are important things we need to be doing right now, rather than wasting our time arguing over what may or may not happen in the future.

The problem with this is that as the crops move north, the amoun ot sunlight received overall decreases. So where near the equator you might be able to plant and grow year round, once you hit the northern borders, one crop a year is about all you can reasonably expect to get.

And there have been observed differences in the way plants grow south versus north - the northern ones adapt to the less sunlight available and put their energy into reproduction, while the ones in the south put a lot of energy into growing big and tall first, then reproduction - because the increased sunlight means they can do that before the growing season ends.

Or would you really suggest that California and say, Washington get the same amount of sunlight year round?

Re:Farmers

[Layzej]

"For most of the USA the likely outcome appears to be less rainfall..."

Do you have a source for this? It certainly contradicts what I read about it. I am not far from Canada, and while it has been unusually warm this year, it has also been very abnormally humid.

The IPCC is a good resource for this: "General circulation models (GCMs) project an increase in precipitation at high latitudes, although the amount of that increase varies between models, and decreases in precipitation over many sub-tropical and mid-latitude areas in both hemispheres. Precipitation during the coming decades is projected to be more concentrated into more intense events, with longer periods of little precipitation in between. The increase in the number of consecutive dry days is projected to be most significant in North and Central America, the Caribbean, north-eastern and south-western South America, southern Europe and the Mediterranean, southern Africa and western Australia." - http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/technical-papers/ccw/chapter4.pdf

Interestingly this is exactly what is being observed.

Re:Farmers

[Layzej]

Thank you oh so much for informing me of my ignorance, AC. I guess the fact that I preside over an educational & support organization dedicated to sustainable agriculture was just a case of bad hiring?

Truly scary in light of your previous comments. Which organization do you preside over? The amplification of the hydrologic cycle is resulting in more intense precipitation events with longer periods of little precipitation in between, and dryer conditions in general for much of the USA. Preparing for every eventuallity seems rather costly when we know that some are not worth considering.