Climate change and 50 years of NASA observations

Climate has always changed. Changes can be documented by observing the behavior of physical variables of the Earth system: temperature, ice amounts, ground cover changes, radiation from the sun, thermal radiation from the Earth surface, ice-sheets variations, sea-ice cover in the Arctic, ice masses, surface water, moisture contents, trace gases, etc. Variations of all these variables are consistent with the warming of the Earth. The rate of warming that has occurred since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is unprecedented within the past hundreds of thousand of years. To continue to document these changes, to discuss their causes and the possible role of humans in the warming process, a high quality database needs to be continued. Since climate change is a global phenomenon, the role of satellite observations in monitoring climate changes is essential. Fifty years of NASA observations of our Planet will be outlined.