Abstract

While NASA has been conducting its highly visible efforts of manned space flight and planetary exploration, it has also pioneered the remote sensing of the Earth from space. It is now time for NASA to expand these efforts and provide revolutionary new capabilities to characterize our home planet and its global environment. The science community has pointed out that Earth is already in a process of global change in which virtually all aspects of the Earth interact as part of an integrated system and the impact of human activity is significant. Today, we lack the ability to adequately foresee the direction of these changes and their effects on the global physical, economic, and social climate. Both our nation and the world now require the understanding to reliably predict the future course of our environment on time scales of decades to centuries in response to both human activities and natural forces. The long-term quantitative measurement of the atmosphere, land surface, oceans, and solid Earth using the global perspective of space is essential as the foundation of this new Earth System science. NASA is committed to pursue this goal through implementation of new Earth observing systems in orbit and information systems on the ground and by stimulating others to contribute to this effort.

© 1987 Optical Society of America