CLIMASAT is an ERC-StG funded project (2022-2027) that opens the black box that surrounds satellite data production, circulation and use in relation with the making of climate knowledge. It investigates the history of the sociotechnical and power-laden practices by which electromagnetic radiation traveling through the atmosphere from the orbits is detected and turned into climate knowledge, allowing to understand how satellite data are affected by society, politics, environment and culture, and viceversa.
CLIMASAT moves away from views of data-as-objects that can be collected if one has the right tool, by emphasising how satellite data become data. It approaches satellite data as relevant research objects by themselves, inherently social and technical artefacts, and related to a knowledge infrastructure, whose production, circulation and use must be historically contextualised.
It researches the scientific, economic, regulatory, mediatic and diplomatic practices of data production, circulation and use to illuminate who produces and who access the data, under what conditions, how access is negotiated, what messages are convened, how are they arranged, and how do they reach different types of audiences -and what remains invisible. And how all these interactions have shaped the kind of climate discourses, practices and policies that we have inherited today.
The research develops in three interconnected strands:
PRODUCING SATELLITE DATA
Data must be actively sought out by people, their technologies, forms of organization, purposes, worldviews and social relations. Satellite data become data in practice, for someone, and in relation to some organized practices in specific contexts. If it is the context that makes data possible, then its scientific, economic, regulatory, mediatic and diplomatic configurations must be explored.
This strand researches the actors involved in data production, together with their material, institutional and professional resources, their activities and the power differentials they express. It is about revealing what lays behind the techniques deployed for producing data, i.e. how sensors are selected, whose goals are prioritized, what do processing algorithms tell us and what remains untold, how data obtained with other sources is mobilized, who is credited for a given work, what kind of data is not produced, or how privilege is baked into satellite data production.
CIRCULATING AND DISSEMINATING SATELLITE DATA
Satellite data do not flow effortlessly and smoothly. Satellite data management is among the principal challenges of making climate knowledge, also because climate data has been always collected with the goal of being archived. If not properly managed, there is the risk of having no data. The challenges are not only to classify, rank, organize, store and reprocess data but also to render them accessible. Disseminating data requires trade-offs for overcoming technical and social frictions, including the norms and behaviors underpinning epistemic practices and the ways of thinking about intellectual property, data sharing and property rights.
This strand emphasises the socio-technical arrangements and infrastructures through which satellite data flow, how were they negotiated, whose interests privileged, and who was left behind. Attention is also put on determining what data were stored and disseminated, what data were not considered, and who was legitimate to decide that, as well as how data was visualised and communicated, what messages were conveyed, and how did they reached different types of audiences.
USING SATELLITE DATA
One way to study technology is to explore how it is used in specific contexts, beyond emphasis on initial processes of invention and innovation. CLIMASAT builds on the premise that all inventions acquire their socio-economic and cultural importance as a function of their widespread dissemination and utilisation. It considers that as important as who made remote-sensing satellites is how their data became extensively entrenched and assimilated in scientific, commercial, political and cultural processes in relation to climate knowledge.
This strand pays attention to satellite data users and the various modalities of use, including by actors not involved in data production. It also explores the challenges of a massive broad use of satellite data. Changing the focus from technology innovation to data use, in turn, allows examining the impact of satellite data in framing public perceptions of global climate.
