cal views to regional scales (Roach 2). The first space-borne LIDAR, which provided the first detailed global profiles of the multi-layered structure of clouds, flew aboard NASA’s space shuttle in 1994. Today, the Vegetation Canopy LIDAR Mission, led by Dr. Ralph Dubayah of the University of Maryland, will be the first launching of a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) device on a satellite to provide scientists with a look at Earth’s environment. This launching will be known as the Vegetation Canopy LIDAR Mission (Isbell 1). The Vegetation Canopy LIDAR Mission will allow scientists to assess a total inventory of how much carbon is in the world’s forests (Higgins and Roach 1). Obtaining an inventory of the vertical structure of forests across Earth’s surface is possible because the Vegetation Canopy LIDAR Mission will map in three dimensional format the “direct measurement of tree heights, forest canopy structure, and derived parameters such as global biomass with at least ten times better accuracy than existing assessments” (Isbell 1). Such information will provide an update of global forest health as well as produce an approximate count of how much carbon the forests hold. Knowing how much carbon Earth’s forests hold is a key factor in climate change economics (Roach 1). At this point, scientists are able to calculate the above-ground biomass of a forest and they know that about fifty percent of a forest’s biomass is made up of carbon. With the information from the Vegetation Canopy LIDAR Mission, they can estimate the amount of carbon contained in the forests (Higgins and Roach 2). These maps will also help scientists identify degraded areas in the forests. Because of cloud cover, many important ecosystem properties of the vegetation and surface of moisture conditions of the forests can not be adequately assessed (Waring 715). The Vegetation Canopy LIDAR Mission has the abilit...
