PREFIRE is NASA's Earth science mission to fly
two CubeSats or small satellites over the polar region.
The science from PREFIRE
is going to help us better understand heat loss at the poles.
And an Arctic warming.
The Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet.
And the information we learn from pre fire will help us better understand
those changes and better predict them in the future, including how that impacts
temperature, sea level rise, ice sheet melt and more.
So the data from PREFIRE is going to be used to improve climate models.
Climate models are tools that we use to better understand
how Earth has changed in the past and to predict changes in the future.
And what PREFIRE is going to do is give us information about this
heat exchange between the Earth and space, and we'll be able to use
that to improve those models.
So the sun doesn't heat the Earth evenly.
There's more heat towards the equatorial regions than at the polar regions.
And when that heat comes in, weather and currents move it towards the poles.
And some of that is is emitted back into space.
But we've never systematically measured the loss of heat
from the poles and pre fires going to give us that information
so that we can better understand and predict climate change in the future.
So the data from PREFIRE is going to be used to improve climate models.
Climate models are tools that we use to both understand changes
in the past and also predict changes in the future.
And Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet.
So we really want to understand that and some of the processes
that are happening in the Arctic ice melt information, snow
accumulation, changes in clouds happen on a very short time scale.
And with pre fire we're flying two CubeSats, an asynchronous orbit.
So we'll get more frequent measurements from it
and be able to observe some of those fast time scale processes and use that
to better improve our models and use those for predictions in the future.
So PREFIRE is going to join the more than two dozen
satellites and instruments in orbit that NASA has
that are continually monitoring our planet.
These satellites and instruments can tell us things like vegetation
clouds and precipitation, carbon dioxide and much more.
Since we've been observing the planet for decades, we can see both
what it looks like today, but also how it's changed over time.
And we also use that information to understand how the Earth is connected
as a system.
So we have satellites that can show us changes
in the mass of ice sheets, others that measure sea level rise.
And we can use these together to understand how changes
in the mass of ice sheets affect sea level rise,
and many more examples of how the Earth is connected together.