Earth System Science at
20 Oral History
Project
Edited Oral History Transcript
Jack A.
Kaye
Interviewed by Jennifer Ross-Nazzal
Washington, DC – 24 June 2009
Ross-Nazzal:
Today is June 24, 2009. This oral history is being conducted with
Dr. Jack Kaye, who currently serves as Associate Director for Research
of the Earth Science Division within NASA’s Science Mission
Directorate. This interview is being conducted at the National Academy
of Sciences in Washington, D.C., as part of the Earth System Science
at 20 Oral History Project, a project to gather experiences from those
who have been intimately involved in various efforts in the launch
and evolution of the Earth System Science. The interviewer is Jennifer
Ross-Nazzal, assisted by Rebecca Wright. Thank you again for joining
us this morning. We appreciate it. I’d like to begin by asking
you how you got involved in your field of expertise.
Kaye:
I’m trained as a chemist—I have a PhD in theoretical physical
chemistry—and as I was finishing that up, I realized I wanted
to work in an area that utilized chemistry to solve problems as opposed
to just investigating fundamental chemistry. I’d always been
interested in environmental science, especially atmospheric science,
and I was able to audit some classes when I was in graduate school.
Got exposed to that. Through that, identified a post-doc—they
let me change fields—and after that, I was able to get hired
on to NASA following the post-doc, and been at NASA over 25 years
now.
Ross-Nazzal:
You started working at the [NASA] Goddard Space Flight Center [Greenbelt,
Maryland]?
Kaye:
My post-doc was at the U.S. Naval Research Lab [NRL, Potomac River,
Washington D.C.], but then I joined a little northward migration of
some people from the NRL to Goddard, and I started at Goddard in December
’83.
Ross-Nazzal:
What sort of projects were you working on there?
Kaye: I worked in what’s now considered the Atmospheric Chemistry
and Dynamics Branch. I was a chemist working mainly with a bunch of
meteorologists and physicists, there really to bring chemical expertise
to a multi-disciplinary project. It was called at the time SGCCM,
the Stratospheric General Circulation with Chemistry Modeling project,
because the idea was to build numerical models of the stratosphere
that included chemistry and meteorology.
Ross-Nazzal:
Was this a result of the Clean Air Act?
Kaye:
Yes, I think it all went back to the fact that NASA had a mandate
to study stratospheric ozone. We did a lot of observations, and we
also had the modeling effort. So I got involved in looking at satellite
observations and especially trying to interpret satellite observations
of stratospheric composition and building models to simulate things,
to look both ways, to use the models and use the data.
Ross-Nazzal:
Was this what you were working on when you first heard about Earth
System Science?
Kaye: Yes. That’s really how I got into it. I was working in
atmospheric chemistry, which was a small discipline of its own or
a poor step-cousin of meteorology. But it was a growing field, because
the whole ozone issue had made it a moderately hot field. So there
were a lot of interesting things to do.
Ross-Nazzal:
What did you think when people started looking at the Earth as an
entire system? What did you think of that idea, being a chemist?
Kaye:
For me, chemistry’s a pretty obvious entrée into that
world because you can think at the molecular level, and a lot of the
things that are of interest really involve chemical reactions that
release and take up your trace gases, whether it’s how do things
get into the atmosphere from the Earth’s surface; how do things
get from the Earth’s atmosphere back into the surface; how are
things transformed; how do things change phase? So those are all,
in some sense, chemical questions. Then also, since a lot of what
we do at NASA is remote sensing; you could sort of look at it as applied
spectroscopy, which is also chemical. That’s still a yardstick
that I bring to it, since I have really no formal training in disciplines
like meteorology or oceanography or geology or anything else. So I
tend to default to thinking at a molecular level, but I’ll think
about it in terms of the big picture.
Ross-Nazzal:
What did you expect would come of the Earth System Science program?
Kaye: It was a little hard to know. I think that for a long time,
we’ve all sort of realized that a fairly holistic view is important
because there are interdisciplinary aspects to things, and one needs
to look at it. I think we also recognized, especially at NASA, but
not exclusively at NASA, that you have to think in terms of the whole
planet. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to really look regionally,
and you can only go so far if you look in terms of kind of a disciplinary
isolation, because so many things are connected to each other from
the point of view of science. Of course, the Earth, you’ve got
people as well, so when you actually think about Earth System Science,
it’s not just sort of a traditional natural science or physical
and biological science, but people can have an impact on a regional
scale and planetary scale, and one actually has to ultimately recognize
the roles of people and the roles that societies play in making decisions.
Ross-Nazzal:
Was there any pushback from any scientists or any sort of turf wars,
like, “Well, this is my field, and I’m not really interested
in participating in an integrated look at the Earth?”
Kaye:
I’m sure there was some of that, but actually, one of the things
that I think NASA was very good about was building interdisciplinary
teams. When I got to Goddard and worked in the branch, I was a chemist;
there were probably mainly physicists, not that many meteorologists.
But I think that there were a few things that we used to say. “Why
do you have a government laboratory?” Well, one of the things
is you do things that it’s hard to do in an academic environment,
and one of which, at the time I think, was to bring together interdisciplinary
teams in ways that might be difficult to sustain in an academic environment.
Because I think at the time, my sense is that the universities were
a little bit more stove-piped. That the oceanographers didn’t
necessarily talk to the meteorologists, and within meteorology, the
people who were more chemically oriented, they probably weren’t
even in the meteorology departments at the time; they would have been
maybe in chemistry departments or some other places. So you had less
of that at some other places.
But I think at NASA, we were always more receptive to that. It took
some time, but I think we probably did a better job than most at a
fairly early stage in facilitating that. Of course, I think NASA as
an organization, especially if you go out a few years, then really
pushed that sort of broader Earth System Science view when others
were not doing that so much.
Ross-Nazzal:
Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about what you think
are some of the key decisions or events that have shaped the current
thinking or current direction of the Earth System Science.
Kaye: Well, there were a few things that probably have proven to be
important. Some fairly obvious ones, I think. It wasn’t a NASA
thing, really, but the [Charles D.] Keeling CO2 [carbon dioxide] measurements
that showed changes in the CO2 concentrations and boasts inexorable
growth with interesting and fairly repeatable interannual behavior.
The whole atmospheric ozone issue became a particularly important
one, both because it dealt with the sense that we can change the atmosphere
in unexpected ways. That’s one of the first areas, maybe the
first area, where a global problem got into the policy arena, with
the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole and the fact that it was
recognition that the Earth can have some unpleasant surprises for
us. But with a good science program, you can unravel them and figure
some of these things out pretty quickly. Then when you can get your
science lined up well, you actually can impact policy at national
and global levels, through the Montreal Protocol and the successive
things to that.
So I think that’s colored some people’s thinking because
in some way, it’s a real success story. The fact that these
problems occurred doesn’t represent success, but the fact that
a problem was recognized from a scientific point of view, the origin
was understood, and then the policies were taken at national and international
levels and now are contracted, and we can look in the atmosphere and
see the effects of the policy: CFCs [chlorofluorocarbons] amounts
leveling and some of the other trace gas amounts have reduced significantly.
Compared to, say, climate change, it’s a relatively or a much
easier problem, so one has to be careful about extrapolating from
that. But I think that was a particular event.
I think some other things is that as the satellite data came further
along, you got some initial things. The Nimbus-7 satellite that launched
in 1978 became a really significant one because that had a lot of
Earth System Science. A good chunk of that was atmospheric, but there
were some oceanic things, especially that. That really helped one
see the fact that one could look at the planet and determine some
things, look at variability, and there’s a lot of stuff to explain.
So once people had that, that pushed people to do better.
There are some other things as well, discoveries that people would
make along the way that were similarly unexpected. I think that people
would have to sort of look at things and say, “What’s
going on here?” Because of my chemistry background, I tend to
think more about some of those examples, but like when some work that
was done, primarily [by] Jack Fishman at the [NASA] Langley Research
Center [Hampton, Virginia], and some people looked at tropospheric
ozone and was able to tie that to biomass burning. This is really
before we had a lot of satellites to do that, but he worked with what
we had. Then we actually did a field campaign designed to investigate
that, because people were able to look out over the open ocean and
see enhanced levels of pollution and trace that back to biomass burning
in Africa and South America.
So that was an example of where people could look at things and say,
“Hey, you know the stuff that’s going on on land is affecting
things in the atmosphere thousands of miles away, but we can actually
track this and figure it out.” So that’s a good example,
I think, of some of the kinds of scientific discoveries that helped
drive things. There are things in other areas that I’m just
not as familiar with the early history.
Ross-Nazzal:
Were there any decisions that you have made personally that have shaped
the current direction of Earth System Science?
Kaye:
When I was a program manager, I think finding good people, because
I did manage a research program, the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling
and Analysis Program, for a number of years. I was program scientist
for some satellite missions and [Space] Shuttle stuff. I think as
people started getting more focused on aerosols, the connection about
aerosols and how they could affect climate. I think people had understood,
but it’s where they got heated up, and I helped support that
process. Other people ran programs; I supported that. I encouraged
some of the people working on satellites to look more at tropospheric
aerosols. Now, maybe other program managers would have been less supportive
of that, maybe not. I can’t assess. But I think the fact that
I encouraged the people in TOMS [Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer]
and SAGE [Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment] to go and look
at tropospheric aerosols, that may be one decision that I made at
a relatively early stage back as a program manager.
Then when I became what was division director, and that took place
in ’99, then I had a little less direct control over things
that got done, but more higher-level control, and there were probably
some things that I was able to sort of make a few decisions and enable
some things to happen, in part because I would hold a small money
reserve. So, say, some of the fieldwork that got done, in some sense,
if I had chosen to direct my reserves in other areas, they would not
have gotten done. I feel that I can take some credit for enabling
things to happen that way. So somewhere, all maybe relatively small,
but some of the things that if somebody would say, “Look, I’ve
got an idea for a field campaign. Can I have some extra money?”
and you sort of know, well, if we make it available, good stuff will
happen, and if I don’t, most likely it wouldn’t, or it
wouldn’t be nearly as good. So there’s some of the things
that I can feel that by applying what flexibility I had, [we would]
be able to do that.
I have been personally also very involved in interagency stuff, so
I feel that I’ve, I hope, had an impact in making sure that
NASA’s work in Earth System Science was connected to that of
our interagency partners, and giving NASA some visibility and credit
for what we do. From a personal point of view, there’s some
other things that I would take particular pride in—in terms
of the fact that NASA works well with the community. We reach out
to the university community in terms of the research program that
we run, the extramural grants program that we have. We try to provide
good solicitation opportunities to people, run a good review process
that engages the community.
One of the things that I’ve also tried to do is to really make
myself available and encourage my staff to be available to help other
parts of NASA, especially the education part or the university part,
so that when we’re dealing with people and institutions that
don’t have significant track record, to help them get connected.
So we’ve worked with the EPSCoR program [Experimental Program
to Stimulate Competitive Research], with the Minority University Program,
to really try to help get them engaged so that we don’t have
kind of disconnected programs, where in the rest of NASA will fund
somebody through a different gate that they just go off and do their
own thing, and it’s unconnected from the rest of the program.
That’s one of the things that I’ve tried to do and have
encouraged other people to try to do.
I think also, we try to send a message, both through my own actions
and through those of the people who work for me, that our job is not
done until the message is out. And just, well, we’re a science
organization, and advancing the state of the science and documenting
results in the peer-reviewed literature are obvious things that we
need to do and we need to do well. That’s not enough. We have
to make sure that people understand more broadly, so we have to engage
with the public, engage with the NASA public affairs apparatus, and
tell our story— through formal and informal mechanisms.
Ross-Nazzal:
What do you think have been the greatest accomplishments of the past
20 years in Earth System Science?
Kaye:
There’s any number of things. I think that in some sense, you
almost have to try to step back because we’re so engrained in
them, I think sometimes we don’t see it. But the fact that we
can look at the whole planet and know what’s going on, on a
daily basis, and we can see variability, understand the origins, be
able to document things in a fairly quantitative way, and in many
cases, be able to provide both a pretty good explanation, say, through
models that can actually, put the right input in, you get the right
output out, and have some predictive capability, that we’re
no longer limited by the things that are easy to observe or the places
that are easy to observe. We’ve got equivalent levels of data
over pretty much the whole planet, whether it’s open oceans,
polar regions, places of political instability or limited infrastructure.
We’ve got about the same degree of knowledge, and we can make
connections between different parts of the world. So 20 years ago,
I think, people might ask about atmospheric aerosols. We barely had
climatologies. Now we’ve got climatologies, we’ve got
vertical distributions, we’ve got information about composition,
and you’ve got information about optical properties.
Of course, we’ve discovered that things are a lot more complicated
than people may have thought. I think one can look at some of the
stuff that we do in the oceans: where does photosynthesis take place
in the oceans? People, I don’t think, had very good sense of
that. We’ve got a much better sense now. We can even begin to
provide information about the nature of the photosynthesis, the types
of organisms, what’s the relationship between the physical state
of the ocean and biological productivity, and now can begin to make
connections, some of which I think we’re still actively investigating.
But sort of what’s the relationship between nutrient deposition,
especially through aerosols, and oceanic productivity. We’ve
got the data sets now; they’re letting people look at that.
How do aerosols affect precipitation, hurricane formation? These are
all questions that people are asking now that we wouldn’t have
had the data to address 10 or 20 years ago.
So those are some of the things that I see as real successes. I think
the fact that we can document what’s going on in the polar regions,
look at sea ice extent, ice thickness, changes of ice mass in Greenland
and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. I don’t know how you’d
do that if it weren’t for satellites. We joke and say you can’t
put enough graduate students out on dogsleds to find these things
out. Someone says, “Besides, it would be cruel to the dogs.”
Similar things: precipitation over the oceans, the TRMM [Tropical
Rainfall Measuring Mission] has helped. You’d think we know
how much it rains over the oceans, but we’re limited by the
ships, how many ships would be out there, and how much measurements
would they get. But the satellites can essentially get data every
day, day after day after day.
From an engineering point of view, I think something else that people
tend to take for granted is, after a while, we make the stuff look
easy. We’ve had teenage satellites—I think Landsat 5 [Land
Remote-Sensing Satellite] is probably 25 years old or something like
that, so we’ve got satellites that are old enough to vote, maybe
not old enough to drink—but when you think about what they’re
doing, which is, for most of them, moving at seven kilometers a second;
going around the Earth 16 times a day; the full blast of the Sun,
nothing between the satellite and the Sun; and then the dark side
of the Earth, coldest, darkest night of space; and then 45 minutes
later, back to the full blast of the Sun; and doing that 16 times
a day, day after day after day. The engineering aspects of that are
really amazing. I’m sure people like me who are sort of lab
theorists and technophobes really have very little appreciation for
just what an amazing accomplishment that is. That’s also something.
I think we’ve made it look pretty easy, and it’s not.
Ross-Nazzal:
Yes, it’s been amazing these past couple of days, just hearing
about all of the things that NASA has been involved with and what
they’ve learned. What do you think are some of the missed opportunities,
as you look back over the past 20 years?
Kaye:
I’m not sure I’d say it’s a missed opportunity.
I mean, there’s certain things—we’re always resource-limited.
I’ll give you an answer that may be more of a NASA answer than
an Earth Systems Science answer, but then maybe we can come back to
that. From a point of view of history, this may actually be a really
interesting thing for somebody to look at—I’ll give you
ideas for your next book or something—which is that we used
to do a lot with the Shuttle. In ’94, Earth science had four
Shuttle missions. When decisions were made, I think for appropriate
reasons, it disconnected the Earth science program from the human
spaceflight program, and in fact, mostly the Earth and space science
program. I feel that within NASA, we really lost something, because
we lost connection between human spaceflight and Earth science or
Earth and space science, and in some sense, we’ve never recovered
from that.
When [Former NASA Administrator] Sean O’Keefe used to talk about
“One NASA”—I don’t know how you really build
One NASA when you’ve got what one might consider some of the
primary science of the agency, Earth and space science, disconnected
from their primary platforms, the Shuttle and [International Space]
Station. I was involved with both Shuttle and Station. I can understand
why we ended up where we did, but it’s a lost opportunity. We’re
not on Station; we haven’t been on Shuttle, in part because
just we haven’t been able to get to Station, and you need the
Shuttle full time to get to the Station. So it may well be, within
the constraints, very reasonable decisions. But I think that that’s
been a great loss to NASA in that we’ve had this disconnect.
I think it also hurts in our ability to communicate to the public,
because we promote the human spaceflight so well, and the public just
tends to pay attention more. We lost that opportunity, and I think
we haven’t really fully figured out how to make the connection
between human spaceflight and robotic stuff. So that’s a missed
opportunity. It may not be exactly what you’re looking for.
Ross-Nazzal:
Not looking for anything in particular.
Kaye: But in terms of science, there’s probably some things
that one would have to think about. For most of these things, you
can always get later. If you can’t get them now, you’ll
get them later. We may not want to wait 30 years to do the ice caps,
sea ice, because maybe it will be gone, or some other things like
that. So I think there’s less of an issue there about missed
opportunities. I’d have to think some more about that.
Ross-Nazzal:
Sure, sure, and you’ll have the opportunity to edit your transcript.
You did mention Shuttle, and that was something I wanted to ask you
about. What sort of contributions did Shuttle make towards Earth System
Science?
Kaye:
In fact, I’m supposed to write something on that by the end
of the month.
Ross-Nazzal:
It’s a good opportunity for you then.
Kaye: Yes, 300 words, which means it’s either not that hard
or really hard. But there are a couple of things. It gave us access
to space, and it let us try some things. So if one looks at some of
the things, something like the original work that was done studying
carbon monoxide with the MAPS [Measurement of Air Pollution from Satellites]
experiment, it gave us a sense of looking at air pollution in regions
of the planet that one would never get to. We did that many, many
years before any satellite was able to do that. We flew a bunch of
things again to get some data early, and the fact that we were able
to get some data from the Spacelab missions on atmospheric composition.
Then with ’92 through ’94 with the Atlas [Atmospheric
Laboratory of Applications and Science] missions, we flew some other
things: the Lidar In-space Technology Experiment demonstrated that
you could do three-dimensional observations of aerosols in clouds,
and that really kind of begat the PICASSO [-CENA] [Pathfinder Instruments
for Cloud and Aerosol Spaceborne Observations - Climatologie Etendue
des Nuages et des Aerosols] mission.
We were able to test some things out from a technology point of view,
some of which went places, some of which did not. The Shuttle Laser
Altimeter that flew twice I think helped lead to the ill-fated Vegetation
Canopy Lidar mission, which ended up getting cancelled, but I think
the fact that you could demonstrate from the Shuttle that you could
actually look at three-dimensional structure of vegetation. Some of
the stuff that was done on Shuttle Radar Topography Mission [SRTM],
I’m less familiar with that, and the predecessors. In terms
of getting radar data, the SRTM, I think, is a marvelous data set
that people will use, especially when we’re allowed to use it
and our DoD [Department of Defense] partners don’t make it hard
for us to use that. There are some things we could do in terms of
calibration. The SSBUV [Shuttle Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet] instrument
flew about eight times.
Then from a technology demonstration, we had the SOLSE/LORE, the Shuttle
Ozone Limb Sounder Experiment and the Limb Ozone Retrieval Experiment.
That really helped, I think. Even though we had very limited data,
that helped convince the NPOESS [National Polar-orbiting Operational
Environmental Satellite System] that a limb scattering technique could
be used for ozone profile measurements, and that’s what NPOESS
actually was planning on using—before they de-manifested it.
So there are a range of things like that that we could do. Of course,
Shuttle launched some of our payloads, like UARS [Upper Atmosphere
Research Satellite], so that’s a good thing. But the fact that
we could get stuff into space multiple times, inclined orbits, do
stuff with foreign partners as well, those are all accomplishments.
Ross-Nazzal:
You mentioned you do a lot of interagency work. What sort of challenges
did you face working with a number of these federal agencies? Can
you give some examples?
Kaye:
Well, one is that there’s many of them, and there’s a
number of coordination mechanisms. So there’s time that it takes.
The one that we interact most closely with is NOAA [National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration], which has a whole host of issues
associated with it. One is that NOAA is a complicated organization,
and in many cases, it seems that we have better relationships with
the different parts of NOAA than they have with each other. So it’s
like you can’t just talk to one person at NOAA, typically, and
think that you’re talking to the whole organization. So that
becomes a challenge. I think especially in the last administration,
they would have these—and there may be some, but this administration,
it’s too soon to say—where they would say, “Well,
we’re the climate agency,” and they would give the sense
of they’re going to do things, and really, it would be very
difficult for them to be up to follow things through. Not because
their intentions were bad, because they weren’t—the intentions
were fine—but budgetarily they weren’t in the position
to do all the things that they would aspire to. That, I think, could
create some problems.
On the other hand, at the working level, we had some incredibly marvelous
relationships and could look to a number of the things that we’ve
done over the years, and there’s no way that either of us could
have done them separately. Like in the stratospheric ozone area, pretty
much from the beginning, it was a joint partnership. Some of the first
big airborne missions that we did would have NOAA people as the mission
scientists, even though it was our airplanes, and a lot of our instruments,
a lot of their instruments. So from the beginning, that was really
a very joint kind of thing. There might have been some tensions, but
they were, relatively speaking, minimal, and I think the people keeping
those things going managed to avoid any of the stuff that might be
imposed by higher-ups. We’ve maintained some other things, like
when we do hurricane field campaigns, those are pretty much always
jointly with the Hurricane Research Division, and it’s hard
to imagine doing some of these things without them.
So it gets complicated, because it’s different from other parts
of NASA. I mean, for planetary science, I think we’re pretty
much it. In astrophysics, well, they can work with NSF [National Science
Foundation] for ground-based stuff and maybe a little bit with DOE
[Department of Energy] on dark matter. Heliophysics, well, there’s
some ties to NOAA and DoD for space weather. But compared to the other
parts of NASA science, we’re much more engaged at the interagency
level. We’ve got multiple coordination mechanisms that are not
duplicative, but they’re not orthogonal. There’s some
overlap between them, and you have to try and figure out sometimes
what’s the relationship between this group and that group and
that group, and just to limit the time as to how much time we can
put into these things.
But I think we’ve pretty much set the tone of, let’s try
to really engage. We tend to take on leadership roles within the organizations.
People end up co-chairing working groups, especially the [NASA] Headquarters
[Washington, D.C.] folks. We’ve provided some detailees where
it makes sense from Centers to support these interagency things and
help make them function well.
Now, the [United States] Global Change Research Program—previous
administration [President George W. Bush] was the [United States]
Climate Change Science Program—we are overwhelmingly the largest
contributors in terms of what the agencies identify as their contributions
to that program. We were like 55, 60 percent, probably more than that
if you go back to the early days. Some of that was because we would
count most everything, and a lot of other agencies wouldn’t
count things. So if you look at, as I say, in terms of what the agencies
identified in the interagency climate program, we’re far and
away the largest contributor. But we are the ones bringing new capability
to looking at the whole planet and to understanding it, as well. It’s
not just the observations, but it’s the science.
Ross-Nazzal:
What do you think needs to happen in the next 20 years? What sort
of decisions do you think need to be made?
Kaye:
From a planetary perspective, there’s major decisions that have
to be made about energy, environment, population, development. They
all kind of come together. The use of resources and the decisions
that we defer will likely create problems. From the point of view
of NASA, we can sort of stand back a little bit and say, “It’s
not our job to make these decisions. We’re not a policymaking
organization; we don’t regulate; we don’t have management
responsibilities. But we provide information, and we can inform.”
So that’s our role, and in terms of what should governments
do about energy and environment, development, population, sustainability—that’s
in some sense probably a separate conversation.
I think part of my passion is to make sure that we do the best job
that we can to provide good information. I do feel that one of the
things that we do is this issue of equivalent quality information
anywhere in the world. Other agencies have more of a domestic focus,
but by definition, most of what we do is global, and it’s likely
to remain that way. From the point of view of what we do, the fact
that we have as good knowledge over the most remote parts of the planet
as we do right here at home, that’s significant.
I think the other thing is that we have this commitment to free and
open data sharing, and I think we really lead by example in that area.
So I think the idea is for the investment that the nation makes on
our behalf, we provide data really for the whole world to use, for
the scientific community to work on, and then for people who want
to put the data to use in as close to real time as they can get it
and to inform policy decision-making on all scales, they’ve
got the data. We’ll work with them to help make it useful; we’ll
engage internationally. That’s something we could probably stand
to do a little more of, but sometimes it’s just hard to figure
out how to reach out to people. I’d love to do more in developing
countries, but sometimes it’s not obvious who you talk to, or
that if you talk to one part of the government, you’re actually
reaching the whole government. So that’s certainly a big thing
for us over the next 20 years.
Now, there’s some things that we still are discovering. There’s
some things that we can do. A key issue, I think, for us, our partners,
and really for the government for which we work is to deal with the
area of sustained observations and especially the sustained observations
that may not be critical for day-to-day operational forecasting kind
of stuff. We’ve got to be able to track the evolution of our
planet and the things that drive it and how it’s responding
to drivers, external and internal. But how do you keep things going
over a period of decades? When does something get too routine for
NASA and we should stop it? But what if there’s nobody else
there really to pick it up? To what extent are we willing to rely
on our international partners for some of that, or do we feel that
we have to do that ourselves?
Those are some big issues, because maintaining consistent data records—and
consistent doesn’t mean identical; I’ll use that in the
way of sort of evolutionary sense, that one wants to be able to look
at the data that describes some part of the Earth system, and if one
sees variation, know that you’re looking at variations in the
Earth and not variations in the observing system. That’s a big
issue. Gaps make for a problem. Poorly thought-out changes can make
for a problem. So doing that right and maintaining the capability
that lets you be sure that you got it right is a big deal because
it’s a fairly specialized kind of thing. Like you see something
unexpected, and then you say, “Well, let’s compare it
to the data from 20 years ago.” Somebody’s got to be paying
attention to the data from 20 years ago. You may have to go back and
reprocess the old data; you may have to try to understand what the
difference is.
That’s a hard scientific problem. So maintaining the scientific
capability to do that, the human capability. We tend to think of science
as not very human-oriented, but it actually is, because you’re
really dependent on people with a particular set of skills and knowledge.
All the while, technology is changing, computing is changing. Somebody
says, “Go back and reprocess the stuff from 20 years ago.”
But if you haven’t done a good job as a data steward, you might
find that your data from 20 years ago is in an almost unreadable format.
So there’s that aspect, and as a government, we have to be able
to find a way, so that whether it’s us or NOAA or U.S. Geological
Survey at some point, that when you need to do the science, the community
can access the data and the tools that they need to be able to do
it.
Ross-Nazzal:
Sounds like a lot of challenges for the next 20, 30 years.
Kaye:
Yes, and there are some other things, I think. There are some workforce
issues. I’m not sure that there’s always as many as some
people say, because people say, “Oh, there’s going to
be all those retirements, and we’re not going to have anybody.”
Well, some of the grants we do, we’re funding one out of six
people, so there’s plenty of good people in some areas. There’s
probably some particular areas that it’s hard to train, recruit,
retain the really good people, and in a time of changing demographics,
to make sure that we will continue to attract a workforce. So the
changing public demographic is something that we have to think about,
and especially in some of these really tough areas. Some of the things
are really challenging. It’s not always so obvious where we
get the people to do stuff that we really need. There’ll always
be some of them. So that’s one challenge.
Ross-Nazzal:
Well, I think we’ve hit our time today. Is there anything else
that you think we should talk about? This is sort of just a general
capturing of knowledge about Earth System Science.
Kaye:
The other thing I can say is that there’s some stuff that—especially
relative to, you said decisions I had made—sometimes there’ll
be some things, too, that is stuff that maybe it’s not at the
core, but it is things that you can say, “There’s an opportunity;
let’s seize it.” So there’s a couple things that
we’ve done. We’ve been sort of dancing around the biodiversity
issue: what can we do for biodiversity? A lot of times people think
biodiversity is how many different kinds of spiders are there or something.
Well, we’re not going to do that from space, but there are some
things we can do. So in the past year or two, we’ve had our
first focused biodiversity solicitation.
In the past, we’ve had little unorganized activities in space
archaeology, and we said, “Well, we don’t want to have
unorganized activities. Let’s put out a solicitation.”
We did that, and we’ve got another one out. So there’s
some of these things that at the dollar level are small, but they’re
some things where we can say, “Look, we see an opportunity;
let’s try to fill that.” Probably if you go back 15 years
ago, one of my predecessors, I think, looked at the Land-Cover Land-Use
Change Area and said, “I want to have a program in that because
we’ve got data from Landsat and some other things,” and
he set up a program, and I think we’re doing some really good
stuff with that. So that may be one thing we didn’t say that’s
worth noting.
Ross-Nazzal:
We thank you very much for your time this morning. We know your schedule
is busy.
[End
of interview]