Making Waves: Microwaves in Climate Change

Climate change is arguably the single most important global challenge of the 21st century. It is appropriate that in this, our first installment of our new editorial series Making Waves, we explore some of the ways that microwave technologies have been involved in this critical research field. Skipping over the obvious but essential roles of microwave communications and tracking in space-based resource management, we instead focus on techniques and data that these systems provide. We also look at some of the more unusual applications and ideas that are being enabled by both current and future microwave component advances and the impacts that they might have on local, and perhaps someday on more global scales. The intent of the article is to provide the reader with links between, and references to microwave technologies and climate science. The authors want to encourage more researchers to seek out and collaborate on ideas and proposals that directly or indirectly bridge these often disparate areas of development. They also look forward to responses from the engineering and science communities via this editorial series as a means of bringing together engineers and scientists interested in sharing new ideas and forging collaborations that might otherwise not form without such a stimulus. Future articles in this series will emphasize other potentially high impact fields with particular cross-over applications to microwave theory and technology.