Can NASA predict natural disasters?

If you live in a coastal region in which you're vulnerable to hurricanes, there are two crucial pieces of information that you want from weather forecasters. The first is what the hurricane's path will be, so that you know whether or not it's going to hit the place where you live. The second is how powerful the storm is going to be.

Since the early 1990s, meteorologists have significantly improved their ability to predict where storms developing in the ocean are headed. But unfortunately, the ability to predict the intensity of hurricanes hasn't improved anywhere near as much. The reason is that hurricanes' power is influenced by a complex array of factors, both inside the storm system and outside it, from the ocean's heat content to the relative humidity of surrounding environments. Making sense of all that from the ground has been a pretty daunting job [source: NASA].

But that's where NASA comes in. Its orbital satellites can see the big picture and gather enormous amounts of data about hurricanes from above as they develop. By matching up that data to how powerful the storms become, they hope to figure out which factors are the most reliable indicators of hurricane ]intensity, and how to predict the pace at which it develops.

Already, researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of Hawaii at Manoa have made one potentially important breakthrough. They've analyzed relative humidity data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA's Aqua space satellite for nearly 200 North Atlantic hurricanes between 2002 and 2010, and compared that to already available data on the maximum winds that those hurricanes produced. The researchers found that hurricanes that rapidly intensified tended to develop when their surrounding environment was more humid compared to the environments that produced weaker storms [source: NASA].

In 2014, NASA is planning to launch a new array of satellites that may give weather forecasters even more help in predicting hurricane intensity. The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), developed by engineers at the University of Michigan, will put a constellation of eight small satellites into a low-Earth orbit. The satellites' sensors will measure various properties in the ocean and the atmosphere, with the aim of coming up with a more precise model for how tropical cyclones form and how they strengthen [source: Moore].

Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes have one important tell-tale sign in common. As the pressure in them builds up before they unleash their fury, they cause small deformations in Earth's crust. If scientists could spot those subtle changes, they might be able to predict more precisely when catastrophic eruptions and quakes will occur.

NASA hopes to help them do that with the Deformation, Ecosystem Structure and Dynamics of Ice, or DESDynI, system, a proposed pair of satellites tentatively scheduled for launch in 2021. One of the spacecraft would bounce radar signals off the Earth's surface, and use them to measure small changes in the Earth's surface over time. Scientists believe this will help them with tracking potential volcanoes and earthquakes [sources: Klotz, NASA].

The second DESDynI satellite would be equipped with a system called LIDAR Surface Topography, which basically will bounce lasers off the Earth's surface and measure the interval it takes for the signal to be reflected. LIDAR similarly would help scientists to spot subtle movements of the Earth's crust, as well as look at shifts in forestry patterns [source: National Academy of Sciences].

When a big earthquake occurs offshore, it can result in a giant wave, or tsunami, which may swamp a coastal area with potentially enormous loss of life and property. But because every earthquake is unique, each individual tsunami exhibits different wavelengths, wave heights and directionality, which makes forecasting their size difficult. In 2010, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Y. Tony Song unveiled a prototype of a new system for assessing earthquakes and predicting the size of resulting tsunamis. The system uses data from NASA's Global Differential GPS network to capture data on movement of Earth's crust, which scientists, in turn, can use to calculate the movement of the seafloor and the amount of energy it puts into a tsunami [source: Schmidt].

In 2011, Song and Ohio State University professor C.K. Shum used Japanese GPS data to analyze the particularly destructive tsunami generated by a March 2011 earthquake off northern Japan, and discovered that the wave actually was composed of two different wave fronts that merged and doubled in intensity as they passed over rugged ridges on the seafloor. That knowledge may help forecasters in the future to predict similarly super-powerful waves, and hopefully speed evacuations of coastal areas [source: NASA].

In February 2013, a 60-foot-across (18-meter), 11,000-metric ton (12,125-ton) meteor exploded in the sky over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, injuring more than 1,200 people [source: Yeager]. Coincidentally, that same day, an even bigger object--an asteroid half the size of a football field--passed about 17,200 miles (27,680 kilometers) from Earth. Had it struck, it would have exploded with a force of about 2.4 million tons (2.2 million metric tons) of dynamite, the equivalent of hundreds of Hiroshima-sized A-bombs [source: Reuters].

Both of those space rocks, though, are tiny compared to some of the other asteroids hurtling through space. And we know that if a big enough object slams into our planet, the results might be hellish. About 66 million years ago, an object 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, trigging a cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs and most other animal and plant life on Earth [source: Reuters].

That's why identifying and tracking asteroids that might venture within the vicinity of Earth is an especially high-priority NASA mission. The goal of NASA's Near Earth Objects program is to compile a database of near-Earth objects and track their movements [source: Messier].

Asteroids are made mainly of rocks and minerals and are formed in the warmer inner solar system, between Mars and Jupiter. They are leftover pieces from the formation of the inner planets of Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury. Comets, on the other hand, are made up of water ice and dust and formed in the colder outer solar system. Comets are leftovers from the formation of the outer planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Comets and asteroids that are drifting near Earth (within 28 million miles or 45 million kilometers of Earth's orbit) are considered to be near-Earth objects [source: NASA].

To hunt for them, NASA has repurposed an existing satellite, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, originally launched in 2009 to search for distant stars and galaxies. NASA envisions that WISE will discover about 150 previously unknown near-Earth objects and gather information about the size and other properties of about 2,000 more [source: NASA].

WISE and the NEO program hopefully will give NASA advance warning of an object on a collision course—and time to implement a defensive strategy, whether that means diverting the asteroid with gravity tractors, solar sails or other future technologies, or simply destroying it with a nuclear blast [source: Messier]. That might help us to avoid the worst natural disaster ever.