For over two decades, the NASA Energy and Water Cycle Study (NEWS) Program has supported state-of-the-art satellite-based, analysis and modeling of Earth’s global water and energy cycle. NEWS is aligned with the most recent NASEM Decadal Survey and its Global Hydrological Cycle and Water Resources chapter’s highest priority questions (e.g. “How is the water cycle changing?”). NEWS also collaborates closely with the global research community through activities such as the Global Energy and Water Exchanges Project (GEWEX), in particular the GEWEX Data Analysis Panel (GDAP). As such, important aspects of combined NEWS efforts are that the lessons learned from its scientific analysis, modeling, prediction, and assessment of consequences, can be used to guide technological and observation requirements for future NASA missions and/or its findings might support future Decadal Surveys, National Climate Assessments, IPCC reports, etc. NEWS recognizes that accurate prediction of not only trends in the mean, but also extremes and abrupt changes, is a key step toward fully realizing NASA’s Earth Science to Actions objectives.
This program element seeks proposals to leverage the NEWS-IA dataset and ongoing development work to better quantify and characterize changes to Earth’s water and energy cycles. Proposers are required to adopt one or more of the following project objectives:
- Improve the methodology used by NEWS-IA and demonstrate reduced uncertainty of the water and energy cycle components
- Improve the applicability of NEWS-IA to Earth System Model evaluation and refinement
- Quantify the abrupt or time-averaged effect of anthropogenic activities (i.e. urban, agricultural) on NEWS-IA estimates of the coupled global water and energy cycle.
Projects are encouraged to develop and use new methods, tools and/or data sets not currently employed by the NEWS-IA team. These may lead to either improved individual components of the methods, or provide improved overall constraint. In particular, projects are encouraged to use observations of components of the global carbon cycle (e.g. Solar-Induced Fluorescence) to further hone in on understanding water and energy cycle processes and how they may be changing.
Application Deadline: January 9, 2025 (Notice of Interest); February 20, 2025 (Applications)
