It has been five years since the Global Change Observation Mission-Climate “SHIKISAI” (GCOM-C) was successfully launched in December 2017. Since then, the satellite has continued serving its purpose of the global, long-term observation of the Earth's environment. MURAKAMI Hiroshi and YOKOYAMA Shingo talked about the technological features and previous achievements of the mission.

“Technological highlights of GCOM-C are related to the high-precision optical sensor that can detect even invisible-wavelength light accurately. Over these long years, this high-performance “eye” has been conducting surface and atmospheric measurements and producing data for aerosols, vegetation distribution, and many other earth surface conditions,” said MURAKAMI.

YOKOYAMA continued, “The optical sensor mounted on GCOM-C is capable of monitoring a broad range of targets on or in the land, atmosphere, ocean, and cryosphere around the entire globe. This is also an important feature of the satellite.”

Describing the project's major achievements made in the past five years, MURAKAMI said, “The project has contributed to the future-prediction study on global warming, through conducting measurements related to aerosol (small particles in the atmosphere), known to have a major impact on climate change, and vegetation density and distribution relating the carbon sink.” In order to address the global warming, one of the recent global challenges, it is essential to be able to accurately understand the climate change trends for the purpose of adequate prediction. This task poses a formidable challenge as the climate change is a very complicated phenomenon involving various earth environmental systems, which has thus eluded effective data-based elucidation. Observation data from GCOM-C provided a solution to this challenge.

In addition to the above, GCOM-C performs accurate measurements for other environmental conditions, such as summer land and ocean heatwave, red tide, drifting algae, and pumice rafts, and provides the data to the public.

MURAKAMI and YOKOYAMA also talked about more recent applications of GCOM-C's data, specifically for supporting fishing and agricultural activities as well as disaster control and preparedness. They shared their prospection to make more achievements aiming to contribute to a wider range of areas.

The GCOM project will continue with efforts to contribute to society while considering the development of the successor satellite.

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