NASA will use a space laser called "CALIOP" to boost its climate research to study polar ocean plants.
"CALIOP" (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization) lidar was e gineered to take atmospheric measurements. It is a device aboard a satellite called "CALIPSO" (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation that was launched in 2006. Both instruments were used to monitor plankton in Polar Regions until 2015.
"The take home message is that if we want to understand the biological food web and production of the polar systems as a whole, we have to focus both on changes in ice cover and changes in the ecosystems that regulate this delicate balance between predators and prey," marine plankton expert Michael Behrenfeld said, Engadget reported.
Ocean ecosystems used to be monitored by satellite sensors that measure sunlight refection of the ocean back to space. The previous method had problems because of the limited sunlight and persistent clouds in Polar Regions. In contrast, the new space laser can illuminate the Polar Regions to measure the plankton day or night between and through some clouds, NASA reported.
"CALIOP was a game-changer in our thinking about ocean remote sensing from space," said Chris Hostetler, a research scientist at Langley. "We were able to study the workings of the high-latitude ocean ecosystem during times of year when we were previously completely blind," Behrenfeld said.
The new study shows that phytoplankton populations rapidly increase when they outgrow the animals that prey on them. This is especially important because commercial fisheries, birds and marine mammals depend on phytoplankton blooms. As soon as the growth acceleration stops, the predators catch up by eating the ocean plants.
Behrenfeld alongside other scientists from NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia collaborated on the study. Their findings were later published in Nature Geoscience.
Watch the video below to know more about the study: