A concept study for Japanese climate change observation mission: GCOM-C

摘要

Regarding climate change, we have still large uncertainties to predict long-term variation, such as the global average temperature after 100 years. According to the report by Inter-governmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), one of the main factors of the uncertainties are from lack of understanding the process between aerosols and clouds. In order to accelerate the understandings of the process, observation of the aerosol over land is crucial. On the other hand, from the monitoring point of view, we do not have sufficient data to distinguish the effect of human activities on and near the land. The results of previous mission; ADEOS-2 Global Imager (GLI) suggests the 1 km ground resolution is not enough for distinguish the effect of human activities, such as deforestation, land cover change, pollution in coastal area, and so on. In this study, we designed a new sensor of which main ground resolution is 250 m, has wide spectral range (0.38～12 miron), rather wide swath for global observation and polarimetry function. The sensor named Second generation GLI (SGLI) consists of two sensors. The first one is conventional push broom type imager for visible and near infrared region with polarimetry channels. The second one is whisk broom sensor for shortwave and thermal infrared. SGLI has 11 channels in VNIR and 6 channels in infrared at nadir position, 2 channels with 3 polarization angles for polarimetry. The total mass of the sensor is around 400 kg. The new JAXA standard bus will carry it on the sun synchronous polar orbit at 10:30, Local Time of Descending Node. The proposed launch year is 2011.