page_title: Global Energy and Water Exchanges
section_title: Goals and design
hierarchical_section_title: Global Energy and Water Exchanges / Goals and design
caption_attribution_description: English: Aerosol pollution over Northern India and Bangladesh Español: Contaminación por aerosol en India septentrional y Bangladesh.
context_page_description: The Global Energy and Water cycle Exchanges project is an international research project and a core project of the World Climate Research Programme.
  In the beginning, the project intended to observe, comprehend and model the Earth's water cycle. The experiment also observes how much energy the Earth receives, studies how much of that energy reaches surfaces of the Earth and how that energy is transformed. Sunlight's energy evaporates water to produce clouds and rain, and dries out land masses after rain. Rain that falls on land becomes the water budget which can be used by people for agricultural and other processes.
  GEWEX is a collaboration of researchers worldwide to find better ways of studying the water cycle and how it transforms energy through the atmosphere. If the Earth's climates were identical from year to year, then people could predict when, where and what crops to plant. However, instability created by solar variation, weather trends, and chaotic events creates weather that is unpredictable on seasonal scales. Through weather patterns such as droughts and higher rainfall these cycles impact ecosystems and human activities.
context_section_description: Predicting weather change requires accurate data that is collected over many years, and the application of models. GEWEX was conceived to respond to the need for observations of the Earth's radiation budget and clouds. Many preexisting techniques were limited to observations taken from land and populated areas. This ignored the large amount of weather that occurs over the oceans and unpopulated regions, with key data missing from these areas. Since satellites orbiting the earth cover large areas in small time frames, they can better estimate climate where measurements are infrequently taken. GEWEX was initiated by World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) to take advantage of environmental satellites such as TRMM, but now uses information from newer satellites as well as collections land-based instruments, such as BSRN. These land-based instruments can be used to verify information interpreted from satellite. GEWEX studies the long-term and regional changes in climate with a goal of predicting important seasonal weather patterns and climate changes that occurs over a few years.
caption: Aerosol pollution over Northern India and Bangladesh
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