Funded by the International Space Science Institute (ISSI), the research involves eleven institutions from seven countries
The International Space Science Institute (ISSI) has just chosen Juan Antonio Añel, a physicist from the Marine Research Centre of the University of Vigo, to lead an international team that will study over the next two years the impacts of climate change on the upper atmosphere of the planet, the orbiting of satellites and space debris.
Eleven institutions from seven countries participate in the project team, including the University of Oxford, NASA, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the UK Centre for Antarctic Research, the Charles University in the Czech Republic, the National Institute of Advanced Research in India, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, the Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the University of Leeds. Juan Antonio Añel, as project leader, and Laura de lana Torre, both physicists from the Environmental Physics Laboratory Group (EPhyslab-Marine Research Centre) and teachers from the School of Aeronautical and Space Engineering of the Ourense campus, are participating on behalf of the University of Vigo.
“The ISSI makes an annual call for proposals to fund teams working on the most relevant topics of the moment in space research and earth monitoring. Because of our latest results on the impacts of climate change, several colleagues suggested the possibility of applying for the call and asked us to lead it, which we did,” says Juan Antonio Añel. The International Space Science Institute, he recalls, “functions as an advanced research institute of international reference in the space field, especially dedicated to the study of the influence of the Sun on the Earth and planetary sciences, which facilitates collaborative research by all the space agencies of the various countries”. The ISSI is currently funded mainly by the European Space Agency, the Swiss Academy of Sciences and the Japan Space Agency, with the participation of institutions such as the National Space Research Centre of China, the Russian Space Research Institute and NASA.
Three objectives and recommendations
The objectives of the project, says Juan Antonio Añel, are several. “Firstly, we will assess the state in which we are to monitor the impacts of climate change in the upper layers of the atmosphere, since right now we have a great lack of data and observation systems, and the satellite missions planned for the coming years do not solve these problems. Secondly, he adds, the project aims to build a database of observations of the middle atmosphere in order to better study those impacts. The third purpose of the initiative will be to quantify the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on the ionosphere and certain properties of the upper atmosphere, such as electron density. “This is important because it is affecting the navigation of satellites and their re-entry time into the atmosphere and increasing the time that space debris remains in orbit and therefore increasing the amount of space debris”. Finally, the initiative will produce a report with recommendations on how to solve these problems.
“Our knowledge of the impacts of climate change is still very restricted to the surface and lower atmosphere of the planet. For reasons such as the lack of observations of the entire atmosphere before the advent of artificial satellites, the impacts in the very upper layers are still largely unknown,” explains Juan Antonio Añel. However, he stresses, “it is important to address this gap in our knowledge”, giving as an example how “the increase in space debris can have very harmful effects on satellite operations or orbital missions”. Thus, adds the UVigo physicist, “it has even been proven that it can lead to errors in measurements with positioning systems such as GPS, something that must be properly quantified”.
Recognition of work and perseverance
Finally, Juan Antonio Añel points out that this project “is based on the work that we have been developing for almost two decades in EPhyslab, which in a way began with my PhD thesis on the study of the impact of climate change on the tropopause of our planet”. Emphasising the importance of UVigo “leading a team like this and on this topic”, the physicist of the Ourense campus highlights how “it is comforting that our colleagues, some of them from centres with great tradition in space research and with great prestige, such as NASA, MIT, NCAR or the University of Oxford, consider that we have the ability to coordinate joint work in this type of research”. Having obtained the funding from the International Space Science Institute, the project coordinator points out that its achievement and leadership “is a recognition of the work we have been doing with constancy and a certain impact, both scientifically and socially, in research into the alterations that climate change is producing in the atmospheric structure”.
Source: DUVI
