Geodesy for Climate Actions
C K Shum, PhD - Professor & Distinguished University Scholar
Division of Geodetic Science, School of Earth Sciences
The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States, ck.shum@outlook.com
Geodesy enables space-based precise measurements of Earth’s shape, gravity field, rotation, and their minute variations as a function of time, enabling 1 part per billion level accuracy to detect signals including changes in sea level and mass changes, ice reservoir mass balance/glaciology, surface/groundwater hydrology, ocean circulations, solid Earth/seafloor/deep-Earth dynamics including seismic and volcanic deformations. An increasingly warmer Earth have been and will in the future continue to adversely impact humankind and its socioeconomic well-beings\, especially in world’s coastal regions and in rapidly urbanized cities. Climate-induced hazards, including but not limited to, rapid sea-level rise, intensified cyclone/storm surges, prolonged floods/droughts, extreme heat/precipitations, wildfires, severe natural/anthropogenic land subsidence, and depletion of surface and groundwater freshwater resources, further exacerbate risks to Earth’s inhabitants. Geodesy and its associated Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) are postulated to be critical to enable accurate and timely monitoring of these hazards with the goal towards achieving effective climate actions. Here, we present current achievements using contemporary satellite geodetic observations, including GNSS and its signals of opportunities, satellite radar, laser and wide-swath altimetry, satellite altimetry, and interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), processed using constrained deep-learning experiments for spatiotemporal resolutions-downscaling over selected regions, towards enabling timely climate-induced hazards monitoring and effective climate actions.
