Europe, US 'climate guardian' satellite to monitor oceans

BERLIN (AP) — A satellite jointly developed by Europe and the United States being launched this weekend will greatly help scientists keep track of the rise in global sea levels, one of the most daunting effects of climate change, a senior official at the European Space Agency said Friday.

The new satellite, called Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, contains cutting-edge instruments able to capture sea level height with unprecedented accuracy, adding to space-based measurements going back almost 30 years.

“This is an extremely important parameter for climate monitoring,” said Josef Aschbacher, the agency's director of Earth observation.

Billions of people living in coastal areas around the planet are at risk in the coming decades as melting polar ice and ocean expansion caused by warming water drives sea levels up.

“We know that sea level is rising," said Aschbacher.

He said the speed of the rising has increased since the 1990s, at first by about three millimeters per year but by almost five millimeters in the past couple of years.

While sea level measurements are also taken at ground level, in harbors and other coastal areas, they don’t provide the same precise uniform standard and breadth as data collected by a single satellite sweeping the entire globe every ten days, said Aschbacher.

“If you measure it at sea level, you have one measurement device in Amsterdam and you have a different one in Bangkok and yet another one in Miami," Aschbacher told The Associated Press by video from ESA offices in Frascati, Italy. "But with a satellite, you can compare these measurements globally because it’s the same instrument that flies over all these areas.”

Its most powerful weapon is the Poseidon-4 radar altimeter, named after the trident-wielding Greek god of the...