GPS Aids Atmospheric Science

Using an old astronomer's trick called radio occultation, today's atmospheric researchers are using GPS satellites to apply the technique, used in studying other planets' atomospheres, to our own. The way radio waves bend through a gaseous space can tell us the temperature of the gas, which molecules make it up, and it's pressure. Moreover, the data are all time stamped and linked to ground-based atomic clocks for continuous calibration, unlike instruments in weather balloons or older satellites, which may drift over time. Robert Kurinski, at the University of Arizona, is most interested in the troposphere, which, according to most GCM's focused on carbon dioxide increase, should be heating up the faster than any other part of the atmosphere, but the data currently do not show this trend.

"That's the problem with a lot of the climate change data to date," he said. "You don't know if it's because the atmosphere is warmer or the instrument measurements are drifting."

It will be several years before there is enough data to resolve a warming signal, if there is one, and I still believe making any economic policy around unproven model predictions is unwise.