Fighting climate change requires a lot of data, and there is no better place to gather this data than from satellites. Satellites have a variety of useful abilities that, if utilized correctly, could help diminish the effects of global warming on Earth. From documentation to surveillance, creating some sort of Big Brother for tracking climate change could present an impactful solution for a warming planet.

How Can We Use Satellites to Stop Climate Change?

Surveilling Illegal Practices

Through high-quality imaging and machine-learning-based recognition technologies, satellites could spot industries’ unsustainable practices in real time. With this space-based technology, illegal and harmful mining operations, manufacturing facilities, logging practices, and more could be quickly spotted, allowing these satellites to notify the proper authorities before any long-term damage to the environment occurs.

Finding and Tracking Emissions

With the implementation of several specialized technologies, such as imaging spectrometers, satellites can identifysources of dangerous emissions such as carbon dioxide and methane gas. NASA currently uses similar technology to assist the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in tracking methane emissions data, allowing them to find, analyze, and mitigate these dangerous sources of global warming. Technologies similar to this have also been used to find oil pipeline leaks and landfill gas sources.

Optimizing Humanity’s Supply Chains

Satellite imagery can be utilized to map supply chain routes, and track inefficient paths, predict congestion, and mitigate excess carbon emissions. With this information, actions can be taken to reroute the flow of certain goods to prevent the decay of Earth’s atmosphere resulting from high amounts of emissions. In addition, geospatial technology can be utilized to identify carbon efficient locations for production, resource collection, and transportation.

Data Collection

Satellite imagery can also allow the world’s top researchers to track and analyze the effects of global warming on planet Earth. With LIDAR technology, satellites can collect data on sea levels, land area, land usage, production levels, and atmospheric gas volumes. In addition, these satellites can track land, sea, and air temperatures over time. With access to large databases storing and tracking the effects of human activity on the globe, climate scientists can predict future climate catastrophes and take actions to mitigate their effects. With this documentation, future generations will also possess an ample amount of information to help them further mitigate climate change.

Climate Catastrophe

When it comes to climate catastrophe, the intersection of machine learning and satellite imagery presents a promising future for predicting and preventing geological disasters. As noted in the article “Future Predicting AI versus Climate Change: Who Will Win,” many companies and governmental bodies are utilizing satellite imagery to train machine learning models to predict environmental issues. For example, Kettle, a risk-analysis company, has developed several models that can accurately predict wildfires, with some of these models predicting wildfires with an accuracy of up to nearly 90%.

Big Brother for Climate Change?

Could the establishment of a sophisticated network of satellite surveillance modules solve global warming? With all of these applications in mind, it appears that a benevolent “Big Brother”  when it comes to climate change could be a promising solution.