NASA Voyage To Explore Link Between Sea Saltiness and Climate

DevotedSkeptic sends this excerpt from NASA: "A NASA-sponsored expedition is set to sail to the North Atlantic's saltiest spot to get a detailed, 3-D picture of how salt content fluctuates in the ocean's upper layers and how these variations are related to shifts in rainfall patterns around the planet. The research voyage is part of a multi-year mission, dubbed the Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS), which will deploy multiple instruments in different regions of the ocean. ... They will return with new data to aid in understanding one of the most worrisome effects of climate change — the acceleration of Earth's water cycle. As global temperatures go up, evaporation increases, altering the frequency, strength, and distribution of rainfall around the planet, with far-reaching implications for life on Earth."

Re:Isn't this more NOAA's job?

[Trepidity]

NASA has an interesting historical discussion of that question [nasa.gov]. The division of labor used to be that NASA flew the observational satellites, while NOAA and NWS did the ground-based work and data analysis. That makes some sense to me, but NASA says that by the 1970s this wasn't working (partly due to budget cuts), so NASA was given authority to run entire programs focused on earth analysis in an in-house manner, including both satellite and ground-based elements. NASA's first major program under that new mission description was the ozone-hole monitoring program [nasa.gov], started in 1979.

Re:Isn't this more NOAA's job?

[Trintech]

Goto the site [nasa.gov] and click Overview > Sponsors. You will see that, while NASA is the one carrying out the mission, its sponsored (ie funded) by several divisions of the NOAA and NSF, etc so think of it more as NASA is being contracted to do this research and not a whole lot is coming directly out of their own budget.

Re:Farmers

[Layzej]

"For most of the USA the likely outcome appears to be less rainfall..."

Do you have a source for this? It certainly contradicts what I read about it. I am not far from Canada, and while it has been unusually warm this year, it has also been very abnormally humid.

The IPCC is a good resource for this: "General circulation models (GCMs) project an increase in precipitation at high latitudes, although the amount of that increase varies between models, and decreases in precipitation over many sub-tropical and mid-latitude areas in both hemispheres. Precipitation during the coming decades is projected to be more concentrated into more intense events, with longer periods of little precipitation in between. The increase in the number of consecutive dry days is projected to be most significant in North and Central America, the Caribbean, north-eastern and south-western South America, southern Europe and the Mediterranean, southern Africa and western Australia." - http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/technical-papers/ccw/chapter4.pdf [www.ipcc.ch]

Interestingly this is exactly what is being observed.