November 13, 2014
More than 15 years ago, Byron Tapley, director of the Center for Space Research (CSR) in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, set out to look at the earth in a different way — from a vantage point of 280 miles above the earth.
Tapley encouraged NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to use twin satellites to measure small changes in the earth using its gravitational field. The joint U.S.-German project, called Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), successfully collected detailed measurements that have resulted in a decade’s worth of valuable data.
GRACE has enabled hydrologists, oceanographers, geographers and glaciologists to shed light on the causes of drought, melting polar ice caps and aquifer water depletion in California and India. Because of the GRACE mission, The University of Texas at Austin has had a leading role in advancing the field of space geodesy — the science of accurately measuring variations in the earth’s land, ice and mass.
Now, for the first time in history, GRACE models are being used gain more insight on how humans have impacted aquifers by combining irrigation records with GRACE’s groundwater measurements. This work was recently featured on NOVA Next.
GRACE was featured on 60 Minutes with Lesley Stahl, which aired on Nov. 16, 2014.
