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Nasa images of change11/24/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() “We’ve published about 15 scientific papers on this topic,” Funk said, “and we’ve forecasted dry seasons in 2016-2017, which helped prevent a famine that year.” As he discusses in his book “ Drought, Flood, Fire (Cambridge University Press, 2021),” “climate change amplifies natural sea surface temperature variations, which opens the door to better forecasts.” But as climate change increases western Pacific sea surface temperatures, it becomes more and more possible to predict devastating water shortages. These changes in moisture flows drive back-to-back droughts. They built on research showing that increased rainfall around Indonesia, caused by anthropogenic increases in sea surface temperatures, resulted in less moisture flowing on to the East African coast during the rainy months. In the intervening 10 years, the researchers have worked to discern and understand the broad, often distant mechanisms that drive drought in the Eastern Horn of Africa and create accurate, tailored forecasts for the region. “Now, following our success in 2016/17, and extensive outreach efforts, the humanitarian relief community appreciates the value of our early warning systems.” “We made an accurate forecast, but we didn’t understand very well what was going on scientifically,” Funk said. And to be fair, he added, the group’s long-range weather prediction capabilities were still in their infancy. While the models said East Africa would become wetter, observations showed substantial declines in the spring wet season. “It was just really horrible.”Īt the time, he said, the available forecasts weren’t able to predict rainfall deficits in this region. “More than 250,000 Somalis died,” Funk said. These efforts were a far cry from similar predictions of sequential droughts that the researchers, collaborating with the USAID-supported Famine Early Warning Systems Network, made for the same region ten years earlier. “We’ve gotten very good at making these predictions,” said Funk, who directs UCSB’s Climate Hazards Center, a multidisciplinary alliance of scientists who work to predict droughts and food shortages in vulnerable areas. In a commentary for the journal Earth’s Future, UC Santa Barbara climate scientist Chris Funk and co-authors assert that predicting the droughts that cause severe food insecurity in the Eastern Horn of Africa (Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia) is now possible, with months-long lead times that allow for measures to be taken that can help millions of the region’s farmers and pastoralists prepare for and adapt to the lean seasons. Science is beginning to catch up with and even get ahead of climate change. Through the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (which leverages expertise from USG science agencies, universities, and the private sector) and the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Center, it has been possible to predict and monitor these climatic events, providing early warning of their impacts on agriculture to support humanitarian and resilience programming in the most food insecure countries of the world. ![]() That’s because the photo hasn’t been color-corrected to account for sunlight scattered by air molecules, which tints the Earth blue when viewed from space-making the DSCOVR’s photo a distinctly hued marble.In Africa, climate change impacts are experienced as extreme events like drought and floods. Compared to the original, the new shot may look a little bluer. The Apollo 17 crew took the original Blue Marble from 28,000 miles away. With a 24-hour view of where the sun shines, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hopes to track solar storms before they hit Earth.ĭSCOVR took this week’s photo from one million miles away. In February, NASA launched the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) to provide a continuous look at Earth’s sunlit face. This new view of Earth comes from a mission meant to collect this kind of data. Unlike those, this week’s photo captured the planet's sunny side at one moment. NASA has released several similar images of Earth since then, but they were stitched together from multiple photos taken at different times. ![]() On Monday, NASA released a photo of the entire sunlit side of Earth-the first since the original Blue Marble photo in 1972. ![]()
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