The geospatial community can play a vital role in global warming research by helping to make a connection between climate change and individual people. The best way to accomplish this is by making satellite imagery and derived information more easily accessible and understandable to the general public, so they can see the impact that climate change has at the local level.

That was the consensus of representatives from SPOT Image Corp., CNES (the French Space Agency) and Google Earth, who engaged in a lengthy discussion following the "Space and the Polar Regions" seminar held in Arlington, Virginia. Sponsored in April by the Embassy of France and George Mason University to kick off the International Polar Year, the event focused attention on the environmental monitoring data that Earth observation satellites have collected over the poles and their importance to research.

In their meeting, Spot Image, CNES and Google Earth picked up on the theme of the conference and examined ways the geospatial industry, specifically organizations providing imagery, can do a better job assisting with climate change research. The three entities elaborated on their own current and future activities to support environmental monitoring initiatives.

Jean-Jacques Tortora, CNES space attaché to the Embassy of France, explained that polar regions are crucial to understanding global climate change because the poles are affected more rapidly and dramatically than other parts of the Earth. And, he added, the changes occurring there influence the oceans, atmospheres and land masses around the globe.

"We are now realizing that indicators of the future of our planet lie at the poles," said Tortora.

Despite this importance, the challenge for environmental scientists in general, and polar researchers in particular, has been getting people to understand that what happens at the North and South Poles impacts their daily lives in France, the United States and elsewhere. The poles are the most remote places on Earth, and few individuals have visited them, so it's hard to make a personal connection.

"The role of Earth imaging satellites should be to fill the missing link between environmental change and human beings," said Antoine de Chassy, president and CEO of SPOT Image Corp. "Global climate change remains an abstract concept until people visualize what it's doing in their own backyard."

The personal connection is invaluable, said Pascale Ultre-Guerard, head of Earth Observation Programs for CNES France. Once people see the impact that climate change has on them, "they realize they can also change the atmosphere and the environment," she said.

Making that connection with satellite imagery, however, has its own challenges. SPOT's de Chassy pointed out that while Earth observation satellites have been extremely successful at identifying environmental change, the link with everyday citizens has often been difficult to establish because imagery historically has been too expensive to obtain and too difficult to analyze for anyone but a trained scientist.

But this has all changed in the past two years, according to de Chassy, with the introduction of Web-enabled technology like Google Earth, which has spanned the last mile between the satellite image and the average person. And de Chassy believes this same technology will fill the same gap between climate change and individuals, with the help of imagery, because it's readily accessible and easy to use.

Google Earth Chief Technologist Michael Jones agreed with the analogy that Google Earth has bridged the gap between remote sensing and individual people, resulting in greater understanding of environmental issues. The ability to use Google Earth and drill down from the global panorama to the neighborhood level enables people to understand natural and man-made events on a human scale.

Jones explained that Google Earth users often zoom in on their houses and then pan around their neighborhoods. They get a different perspective on the influences of human activities, such as development, right in their immediate surroundings, which they understand because they also see those impacts in their daily lives. Then when they pan out and zoom back in on similar changes in other parts of the world where they've never been, a global connection is made. This helps them internalize the concept that environmental processes are inter-related regardless of where they occur.

"That range of information is very important to satisfy both parts of the human cognition system," said Jones. "We built Google Earth because we want people to understand."

Turning Imagery into Action
The discussion then turned to specific initiatives that SPOT, CNES and Google have undertaken, or plan to begin soon, that will leverage remote sensing data and heighten the public's awareness of climate change issues.

(c) CNES 1994 - Mount Erebus in Antartica, by SPOT5. Distribution Spot Image. (Click for larger image)