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NASA’s Aquarius Sees Salty Shifts

By Guest PostMarch 1, 2013Environmentafrica, amazon river mouth, aquarius, aquarius instrument, arabian sea, argentine built, bay of bengal, caribbean, changing global climate, chronicle, cold polar waters, conae, cycling of freshwater, eastern tropical pacific, eric lindstrom, flag data, ganges, gary lagerloef, gene carl feldman, global rainfall patterns, heavy rain, ice free oceans, land contamination, large freshwater plume, mediterranean sea, microwave emissions, microwave radiometer, middle east, monsoon rains, NASA, ocean circulation, ocean salinity patterns, ocean salinity satellite, panama coast, pulses of freshwater, salinity processes, salinity variations, salty arabian sea, salty shifts, salty world, seasonal stirrings, smos, soil moisture, spacecraft, spurs, surface salinity data, varying salinity patterns, winter

The colorful images chronicle the seasonal stirrings of our salty world: Pulses of freshwater gush from the Amazon River’s mouth; an invisible seam divides the salty Arabian Sea from the fresher waters of the Bay of Bengal; a large patch of freshwater appears in the eastern tropical Pacific in the winter. These and other changes in ocean salinity patterns are revealed by the first full year of surface salinity data captured by NASA’s Aquarius instrument.

“With a bit more than a year of data, we are seeing some surprising patterns, especially in the tropics,” said Aquarius Principal Investigator Gary Lagerloef, of Earth & Space Research in Seattle. “We see features evolve rapidly over time.” (more…)

NASA Mission Will Observe Earth’s Salty Seas

PASADENA, Calif. – Final preparations are under way for the June 9 launch of the international Aquarius/SAC-D observatory. The mission’s primary instrument, Aquarius, will study interactions between ocean circulation, the water cycle and climate by measuring ocean surface salinity.

Engineers at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California are performing final tests before mating Aquarius/SAC-D to its Delta II rocket. The mission is a collaboration between NASA and Argentina’s space agency, Comision Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE), with participation from Brazil, Canada, France and Italy. SAC stands for Satelite de Applicaciones Cientificas. Aquarius was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. (more…)

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NASA’s Aquarius Sees Salty Shifts

NASA Mission Will Observe Earth’s Salty Seas