remote sensing is observing a medium a process some phenomenon without ever coming in direct contact with the phenomenon so unlike a lab experiment or where you go to place and make an situ measurements are actually touching the medium remote sensing is observing it remotery from a distance and this actually provides a different kind of perspective on things when you're past of your medium your past of your experiment you're past of the experience you get one perspective that's crucial you get a very different one when you removed from it when you're looking from space when you're looking from 500 miles away or in some cases 20000 miles away we can start up close we can zoom at ant all of a sudden it rakes on new meaning the trees are past of a broader system that's it on a land mass that is a conuntry that's part of a continent that sits in an ocean and as we step back further and further and look at those same trees we may not see the leaves from far away we see the trees and how they fit into a broader system the clouds that surround them the ice that's far north as far south of them the oceans that really are affecting the climate that is causing those trees to grow your causing those trees to grow your satellites are really the best way to measure the effects of climate change because just one person on the ground in one place it's very difficult to say what you see in front of you is due to climate change or due to some local phenomena or is it is just the weather and from space we can look at the whole earth and we can integrate these observations of the whole earth and really make a batter assessment about what's causing these changs and what their long - term prognosis is a decade ago the eart observing system was beginning to be put in place a series of satellites designed to observe the earth take a snapshot of the earth over a peried of years to understand its behavior well to date there are 14 earth - observing satellites orbiting right now and of those 14 13 are past their design line they're living on borrowed time and could go away at any moment
i think funding as for the satellite mission is very much threatened right now there doesn't seem to be a lot of support and political circles right now for these mission and so that's something that scientists we're trying to do is to educate people about why they're so important like i said the grace mission has been really am my opinion one of the best tools we have for measuring the impact of climate change on earth that tells us where the water is going and that's you know when we talk about climate change everything about the temperature but it's really a water availability that it's going to be the big impactor and so will be able to tell with grace you know where we're losing water whether it's going to be prolonged droughts where there's going to some more flooding where the ice is melting it's just this wonderful tool and now we're gonna lose this tool for probably two to three years and you know it's really unfortunate that we kind of take away one of our eyes in the sky the earth is changing in away that will affect our lives and just as we're realizing how and why these change are occurring our ability to understand them is diminshing and frankly our future our success in the future as a society really depends is intimately linked to our ability to anticipate what's coming