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

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.