NASA's Land Information System (LIS) uses computer models to predict impacts that cities and other local land surfaces might have on regional and global land and atmospheric processes. Dr. Christa Peters-Lidard, Co-Principal Investigator and Project Manager for LIS, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Md. will make a presentation on LIS this week at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society in Seattle.
Until recently, scientists could not model detailed, local interactions between land and atmosphere on the global scale because satellites did not provide a close enough view of Earth, and computers were too limited. But with cheaper high-performance
computers, and with satellite technologies like the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on the Terra and Aqua satellites, scientists are working to predict energy and water cycles for the entire globe at a scale of 1 kilometer (km) (.6 miles). That means computer models can now supply information about processes that occur locally, like within neighborhoods where people live, for example. The global LIS has been implemented at 5 km (3.1 miles) resolution and will be implemented at 1 km resolution in February, 2004.
"Now we can apply all these resources to understand and predict how humans impact their local water and energy cycles and ultimately their weather and climate," said Peters-Lidard.
As a case study implementing one simple aspect of what LIS can do, Peters-Lidard, colleague Paul Houser of NASA GSFC, and others used a model to predict summertime temperatures in Houston for August 22, 2002. The model found temperatures were 1 to 2 degrees Celsius (1.8 to 3.6 degrees F
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Contact: Krishna Ramanujan -AMS Press Room
krishna_ramanujan@ssaihq.com
206-219-4730
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
13-Jan-2004