How can NASA be measuring the surface temp of Earth from space when the atmosphere is absorbing the heat?

Question

Its being done so does that mean the heat is going through the atmosphere or is the process making an alowance for the great amount of heat being absorbed by the atmosphere?

Answer 1

I don't recall hearing that NASA claimed to be able to measure the surface temp from space. What they do measure is the temp of the atmosphere at various altitudes. The only accurate way to measure the surface temp is with a ground station and a reliable thermometer.

Unfortunately, the thermometers aren't always reliable and the ground stations themselves are sometimes situated in a way that seems to be intended to create a bias towards greater warming. See surfacestations.org or climateaudit.org for info on how often stations have been moved to a warmer area, usually a paved area or near a heat source. Then the temp record for that station seems to go uncorrected for this bias which makes the entire temp record less reliable. If you only look at rural stations away from heat pollution you find much less warming than the IPCC claims we're experiencing.

Answer 2

All objects emit heat in the form of infrared light. Infrared detectors can see through the atmosphere and detect heat sources. This is the same technology that astronomers use to see through the milky way’s dust lanes, deep into the interior towards it center.

Answer 3

go here

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/sate...

to see infra red satellite pictures. see the way africa is all dark? that's hot ground. if you run the animation, you can see places getting hotter and colder.

Answer 4

The planet is not a giant sponge that sucks up everything.  Some heat is reflected back into space.

Answer 5

The NASA does only minor temperature monitoring. It is the NOAA and the GOES, who operate the service on a permanent basis.

In Europe, Eumetsat (Meteosat). Japan too has satellites (GMS).

They measure infrared wavelenghts

They do take in account the absorption by atmosphere. They have physical tables and formulas to compute it, and re-assess a surface temperature from a satellite measure.

When there are clouds, the satellites can only measure the temperature of the top of the cloud, not the temperature of the ground. This is what you see on the usual weather reports on TV, especially in the case of hurricane.

Answer 6

Science has been so advanced these days that you can measure the heat of an object just by even looking at using a device, that is basically what scientists call as heat spectrometer, this device does use  the infrared radiation emmited by an object or matter even planet Earth, these infrared radiation are then measured by the spectrometer according the intensity of the color, white being the hottest, red a little colder, and blue much colder.  But it doesn't mean that these color really indicate the real temperature, aside from that, these devices also employ other heat  measuring sensors that enables NASA to accurately measure the Heat emmited by Earth to space.

Answer 7

There are several atmospheric windows in the infrared that can be used for ground observations (see reference).  The shape of Planck distribution is temperature dependent, hence observations at two wavelengths are sufficient to deduce the temperature.  

Molecular spectra can also be used to deduce the temperature.  The population in rotational quantum states is determined by the density of states and the temperature through the Boltzmann factor exp(-E/kT), where E is the rotational energy, k is Boltzmann's constant and T is the temperature in Kelvin.  

The reader is referred to any undergraduate text on quantum mechanics to learn more about quantum numbers and the density of states.  I'm not going to write a textbook here.