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Today, there exists an integrated, large-scale satellite system to track sea-level rise, its speed, causes, and impacts. Building it was a struggle every step of the way. It was the most vivid and potentially consequential program within NASA's larger Earth Science directorate. How did it happen? Who did what? Why? This book seeks to answer such questions. It goes back to the origins of NASA's interest in the oceans in the 1960s and first true ocean satellite, Seasat, in 1978. After three months of operation, Seasat failed. But before it did, it showed how much satellites could tell about the ocean's dynamics. In many ways, sea-level rise is the clearest and most understandable result of a warming planet.

Althoughthisisacompanion volume tomypreviousbook Measuring the Oceans from Space, published in 2004, it approaches the subject from a di?erent angle by providing abroad-ranging introductionandreviewoftheapplicationsofsatelliteremotesensing across the?eld of oceanography. During the?ve years it has taken to prepare this book what has motivated me is the attraction of the subject itself. In searching the scienti?c literature I have been excited by the interesting, new, and important elements of satellite oceanography being discovered around the world. I hope this book will help others to discover for themselves how sensors in space are giving us a new perspective of oceanographic phenomena and are increasingly enabling ocean science to serve the needs of modern civilization. Primarily I have written with postgraduate and senior undergraduate students in mind. Readers of my previous book will know that it aimed to present a systematic explanation of the diverse methods of satellite oceanography, the breadth of scienti?c knowledge, and the richness of innovative technology developed over 30 years since the?rst dedicated ocean satellite was?own in 1978. But satellite oceanography is too important a subject to treat just as a specialist topic for those with an interest in observational instrumentation and data-processing techniques. In recent years the availability of high-quality, processed satellite data has delivered remarkable and inspiring images of the ocean, which can almost tell their own stories.

Only a few centuries ago, we knew very little about our planet Earth. The Earth was considered flat by many although it was postulated by a few like Aristotle that it is spherical based on observations that included the study of lunar eclipses. Much later, Christopher Columbus successfully sailed to the West to discover the New World and Ferdinand Magellan's ship circumnavigated the globe to prove once and for all that the Earth is indeed a sphere. Worldwide navigation and explorations that followed made it clear that the Earth is huge and rather impossible to study solely by foot or by water. The advent of air travel made it a lot easier to do exploratory studies and enabled the mapping of the boundaries of continents and the oceans. But aircraft coverage was limited and it was not until the satellite era that full c- erage of the Earth's surface became available. Many of the early satellites were research satellites and that meant in part the development of engineering measurement systems with no definite applications in mind. The Nimbus-5 Electrically Scanning Microwave Radiometer (ESMR) was a classic case in point. The sensor was built with the idea that it may be useful for meteorological research and especially rainfall studies over the oceans, but success in this area of study was very limited.