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Scientists Plot Sea Levels Using GPS Satellites (engadget.com)
A team from the UK's National Oceanography Centre (NOC), University of Michigan and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have discovered a new way to accurately measure the sea level. The technique is called GNSS-R, and involves bouncing low-powered signals from GPS satellites off of the ocean's surface and measuring the reflected signal with a GNSS-R receiver. The team used a research satellite launched last year as a GNSS-R receiver, but it will be able to tap a new constellation of receivers that NASA is launching this year as part of CYGNSS. That mission will make accurate measurements of surface winds using GPS satellites, but NOC scientists will be able to use them to measure ocean levels, too, yielding a thirty-fold increase in such data.
It will turn us into a bunch of hypochondriacs with every little fluctuation
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Oregon State University ( http://www-po.coas.oregonstate... ? has been recording ocean s"sea level" and other data with sophisicated instruments since the 1970's.
This is an interesting leverage of GPS technology, but the data is for the most part already being collected in much finer detail with many additional parameters.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
... when these measurements corroborate the existing (and already very convincing) evidence for sea level rise, the wingnuts will come up with yet another obscure rationalization explaining why they should be discarded or ignored.
Alas, with deniers, it's like playing whack-a-mole: when you point to any specific piece of evidence, then out come the excuses for why that one thing is not relevant. When you point out the totality of evidence, out come the irrelevant details.
...and when the satellites show that the sea level IS rising, are you going to fall back to your tired old refuting the data? or challenging the way it's collected? or the most obvious one will be.. "the data doesn't go back far enough"...
You'll say "natural cycle" NO. MATTER. WHAT.
No, it means soon we'll have more data, which is always a good thing.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
When the satellites show that the sea level isn't rising
I doubt that will happen, because we already have evidence that it is rising.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Of note, the use of GPS for surveying sea surface height has proposed or experimented with for a number of years (Cardellach, Estel; Martin-Neira, Manuel., April 2010). It might be because they've moved beyond 'proof of concept', but I think to say they discovered it is a bit strong. I've even found papers detailing the experimental use of GPS satellites to determine sea surface heights as far back as 2001 (Martin-Neira, M; Caparrini, M; Font-Rossello, J; Lannelongue, S; Vallmitjana, C S, 2001). The bggest change might be a reduction of errors, going from (30cm errors in 2000 to 5 - 15cm in 2009. If they've managed to further reduce the size of the errors then they're onto something really big. If they've just found a more efficient method of measuring sea surface heights in the open ocean, well that's pretty cool, but I'm not sure it's quite a game breaker.
As far as sea surface rise being a hoax, that's a silly statement, after all the empirical evidence is pretty strong, We have long term gauges that have been operating for centuries in a number of areas, and excepting for regions of crustal rebound, raw sea level rise is consistent with expectations if additional heat was being pumped into and inceasing the depth of the thermocline..
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
More data is indeed good, but expect it to simply show more detail over the data we already have. It's highly unlikely that it would indicate anything substantially different at this stage to what we're already seeing, as you seemed to think might happen in another comment.
If it actually did indicate something different, and it didn't turn out to be instrument error or a faulty assumption in how it worked, then we'd not only have to look for similar undetected errors in our many other (much more mature) instruments, but we'd also have to come up with novel and probably tortuous explanations as to why the sea level wouldn't rise despite clear thermal expansion and the many cubic kilometers of melting land ice around the world that we can also measure...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
That made what happened in Nevada even more entertaining. It explains why the GOP might think there's rampant voter fraud...because they have the receipts to prove it.
https://news.vice.com/article/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Satellites have already been in use for decades, and show sea level rise on the high side of projections: http://www.skepticalscience.co...
Satellite altimeter radar measurements from TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, and Jason-2 satellites have been measuring sea level rise for decades: http://www.star.nesdis.noaa.go...
It's likely to fall locally in some places while rising globally, so they just have to cherry pick the location.
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