The medea program: Opening a window into new earth science data

Abstract

In the early 1990s, the US environmental science, Intelligence, and Defense Communities came together in one of the largest declassification efforts ever undertaken. The collaboration was sparked by US Vice President Al Gore and US Central Intelligence Agency Director Robert Gates who saw the contribution that this unused global information could make to our understanding of Earth’s environment. Their leadership led to the formation of a group named MEDEA, consisting of scientists representing a broad set of Earth science disciplines who were given access for the first time to highly classified data from the US Intelligence Community and the Defense Department. The new data led to deeper insights into Earth processes and more than doubled the existing ocean database. MEDEA’s later unique collaboration with intelligence agencies in Russia resulted in US-Russia Oceanographic Atlases that have been used for more than 20 years now. The MEDEA program also supported complementary research studies on key observational topics and analyzed the issues of climate treaty monitoring and verifying CO2 emissions. The data revealed are still being used for time series and comparison with new measurements of global change. MEDEA’s Global Fiducial Data Network continues to monitor critical environmental parameters today. The MEDEA effort brought important new data on global change to the science community. It showed that national security systems acting in concert with civil and commercial remote-sensing systems and in situ measurements can significantly improve collection of critical environmental parameters.