Northrop Grumman’s Tom Romesser Speaks at UK Conference on Climate Change

LONDON -

- Transforming climate data into knowledge is key to addressing global climate change

A senior Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) executive is among the distinguished speakers from leading defence and aerospace companies participating in the climate change conference, Energy, Environmental Defence and Security (E2DS) 2009 being held this week in London.

Tom Romesser, chief technology officer and vice-president Advanced Programmes and Technology division for Northrop Grumman’s Aerospace Systems sector addressed the E2DS conference organized by Dynamixx. The conference, held at RSA House from 5-6 Nov 2009, brings together more than 150 leading international technologists and environmentalists-spanning government, industry and academia-to discuss the aerospace and defence industry’s emerging role in combating climate change.

Speaking at the conference, Romesser said, “Critical to addressing the challenges of climate change is the need to develop robust decision support information systems that bridge the gap between the mass of scientific data on one hand, and the ability to translate that data into practical, decision-quality knowledge on the other.”

He commented that in order to deal with the manifestations of climate change, policy and decision-makers need a broad mechanism with which they can arrive at the most appropriate mitigation measures. Observing systems, modeling systems and decision support systems form the key links that comprise the “information infrastructure” needed by the policy and decision-makers.

“Practical solutions to climate change must be accessible to all levels of understanding. This requires an immense amount of data and the goal is to synthesize and integrate climate data and modeling products into practical, decision-quality knowledge. The challenge is to find a way in which existing sensor and modeling information can be integrated and consolidated into something that is capable of supporting the decisions of local and regional policy-makers.

The technical capabilities and expertise that have been developed by the aerospace and national security industries are ideally suited to help integrate some of the many tools already in place and to supply those that are not.”

Northrop Grumman has a wide range of experience in developing space systems for monitoring global change, from orbiting space platforms to precision sensors; the company’s remote sensing systems measure short- and long-term variations on the planet, enhancing knowledge of global weather and environmental trends.

Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor for the National Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) and leads an industrial team under contract to the tri-agency NPOESS Integrated Programme Office. NPOESS, the next-generation, low-Earth orbiting operational weather and climate monitoring system is designed and being built to provide significant improvements in the timeliness, accuracy and fidelity of critical information for both defence and civil needs. The NPOESS capability is planned to be launched initially in 2011 with multiple sensors on the NPOESS Preparatory Project and 4 satellites in two polar orbits to monitor more 19 of 26 essential climate variables from space. The NPOESS will enable scientific data to be used faster and more frequently for improved forecasts and warnings. The joint constellation of NPOESS and European MetOp satellites will provide the international community global coverage from advanced atmospheric imaging and sounding instruments with a data refresh rate of approximately four to six hours.

Northrop Grumman is also helping pioneer the application of its Global Hawk fully autonomous high-altitude unmanned aircraft system (UAS) for environmental science research. The company is providing engineering and technical services to NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center to support NASA’s use of Global Hawk for Earth science research. In October 2009, NASA and Northrop Grumman announced the initial flight of a Global Hawk UAS to be used in this research application.

Northrop Grumman has a well-established presence in the UK with a heritage of nearly 100-years. It operates from primary UK locations at Fareham, Chester, Coventry, New Malden, Peterborough, RAF Waddington and Solihull, providing avionics, communications, electronic warfare systems, marine navigation systems, unmanned ground vehicles, C4I solutions and mission planning, aircraft whole life support, IT systems and software development.

Northrop Grumman Corporation is a leading global security company whose 120,000 employees provide innovative systems, products, and solutions in aerospace, electronics, information systems, shipbuilding and technical services to government and commercial customers worldwide.

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Source: Northrop Grumman Corporation

Ken Beedle of Northrop Grumman Corporation, +44-207-747-1910, +44-7787-174092, Ken.beedle at euro.ngc.com