Drier, wetter, stormier: How Air NZ passenger planes will track climate change
Passenger planes traversing New Zealand skies will soon be ferrying climate information, as well as people. Even veteran Nasa scientists are excited to learn what comes out of the New Zealand project, which will see receivers fitted to commercial planes. The state-of-the-art receivers should be able to detect droughts, floods and sea level rise using the same GPS signals we use to find lost phones and to navigate our cars. Initially, a single 50-seater Air New Zealand Q300 plane will be fitted with a receiver later this year for a project involving Nasa, Auckland and Canterbury universities, and the newly created New Zealand Space Agency. The Ministry for Innovation, Business and Employment will stump up $1.5 million funding for the first three years. If all goes well, researchers hope to fit more Air NZ planes with sensors. Since Q300s fly to most parts of the country, and each sensor covers a wide area, it could create New Zealand's biggest trove of environmental data, giving scientists their best view yet of how droughts and other impacts are worsening, said project leader Delwyn Moller. READ MORE: * What Pakeha call climate activism is survival for indigenous people * JPMorgan warns of climate change as a threat to 'human life as we know it' * Australia's bushfire smoke will do a full lap of the globe, Nasa says "It's going to be very telling," Moller said. "What you'll see is the patterns changing over time, so, somewhere where we used to have flooding but now the flooding is coming much further in." The research piggy-backs on the fact that GPS signals are being sent constantly all around us albeit for navigation, not climate-monitoring purposes. When these signals bounce off land or water, scientists can use them to garner clues about what is happening on the ground or on the ocean's surface. Nasa already has a network of eight satellites it uses to gather GPS reflections to help scientists learn about the risk of cyclones. Since choppy oceans reflect the signals differently from calm seas, the signals mirror what's happening on the water. Lately, scientists have learned that these the reflections can teach them about more than cyclones the strength of the reflections can reveal how dry the soil is, where floods are, or whether the high tide line is creeping inland at the coast, because of sea level rise. The techniques were new, and the Air NZ project will help show Nasa what it can do, Moller said. "This will set the scene for future missions." New Zealanders would benefit from better information. Both floods and droughts will become more common as the world heats, affecting decisions such as where to plant crops, what to farm and where to build new housing. The country is experiencing what serious drought can look like right now: Niwa's New Zealand drought monitor is set at dark red from the upper Waikato to the Far North, indicating severe drought. Niwa said last week that nearly all of the North Island had reached "hot spot status" when soils were "severely drier than normal". If the plane-mounted sensors work, the climate data they collect will be made available to everyone including the Ministry for the Environment and the new Climate Commission, if they wanted it, Moller said. Nasa stood to benefit because, Moller said, the plane-mounted sensors would give a closer, better view of the land than Nasa's satellites. Crucially there is an area of overlap over Northland between land that is covered by Nasa's satellite system and the area that will be flown over by the Q300 planes. Having both sets of data will let Nasa to calibrate its satellite system and check that it works effectively for tracking climate change. The New Zealand data will be collected in a box on the aircraft and sent back to Auckland University for processing when the plane lands, then sent on to Nasa. While the hope is to gather long-term data, MBIE's Peter Crabtree said taxpayer funding was only committed for the next three years. Crabtree said the Air NZ receivers might be redundant after that, because Nasa satellites could take over once the concept has been tested. If a partnership between New Zealand scientists and Nasa seems unusual, the ability to fit scientific sensors on commercial airplanes is even rarer for researchers, Moller said. Air NZ said it wanted to get involved because it was seeing climate impacts already, with flight-disrupting storms and extreme weather on the rise. Its Q300s cruising at 5000 metres are much closer to the land and sea than Nasa's satellites, making them the perfect option. Outside the confines of the project, Air NZ has been grappling with aviation's status as one of New Zealand's larger emitters, particularly though international travel and tourism. When it comes to tracking climate impacts, however, Moller said the airline's help opened up a "treasure trove" in terms of the scientific potential. "I just gave a briefing at a Nasa science team meeting on this a few weeks ago and sitting in that room are a bunch of eminent scientists who have been around for many decades. One of them was almost giddy, and he is not a giddy person. There is so much excitement because of the richness of the information we will get."