#oco-2

[earthstory]

El Nino and CO2

Due to the high-precision monitoring of atmospheric CO2 contents measured in places such as the top of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, scientists have known for years that El Niño events are associated with bigger jumps in atmospheric CO2 than are seen during non-El Niño years (https://tmblr.co/Zyv2Js23gZIW2). However, until the 2016 El Niño, scientists didn’t have a tool that could measure exactly where on Earth that extra CO2 was coming from.

That changed last year. 2016 saw the strongest El Niño event on record and lurking overhead was a satellite launched by the United States called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2). That satellite carries spectrometers that allow it to measure how much CO2 is in the atmosphere at certain spots, meaning it can measure where extra CO2 is coming from. This image shows an early version of data from that spacecraft – CO2 measurements from 2015. OCO-2 analyses confirmed; a whole lot of extra CO2 release to the atmosphere was triggered by the 2016 El Niño.

There have been three major hypotheses for the source of the extra El Niño CO2: wildfires in Asia where the monsoon is weakened, less growth of the Amazon rainforest, and greater exhaling of CO2 as forests in Africa heat up. It turns out, OCO-2 measured that all 3 of these contributed to the extra CO2 released in 2016.

Getting actual data on all of these processes in an unusual year will let scientists understand how the planet will respond to future changes. For example, warm years in Africa or wildfires in Asia can be triggered by other climate changes that would be expected on a warming world.

The total excess CO2 release triggered by the El Niño event was huge; it was 20% of the total CO2 emitted by human industrial activity last year. Some of this CO2 will recover in future years; wildfire burn areas can slowly recover, but not all of it. For example, a low growth year in the Amazon means that the trees just grew slower, they won’t just grow faster this year because they had a low growth year last year. As the world warms from increasing reenhouse gases in the atmosphere, releases of extra CO2 from the biosphere can therefore become a very large feedback, a way to trigger even more extreme warming as a consequence of initial warming.

-JBB

Image credit: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=pia20039

Reference: http://www.nature.com/news/massive-el-niño-sent-greenhouse-gas-emissions-soaring-1.22440

[greenfue]

الأقمار الصناعية تكشف سرًّا جديدًا في دورة الكربون بأفريقيا

تكشف بيانات الأقمار الصناعية عن ارتفاع امتصاص الكربون في المراعي الأفريقية مع هطول الأمطار، على عكس الغابات والسافانا. تُعدّ أفريقيا مصدرًا للغموض في حسابات دورة الكربون. فوفقًا لبعض التقديرات، تُصدر تضاريس القارة 2.1 مليار طن من ثاني أكسيد الكربون سنويًا، أي ما يعادل نحو 1.5 ضعف الانبعاثات السنوية من محطات الطاقة العاملة بالفحم. بينما تشير تقديرات أخرى إلى العكس تمامًا، حيث تُظهر أن النباتات…

الأقمار الصناعية تكشف سرًّا جديدًا في دورة الكربون بأفريقيا

[scifigeneration]

Researchers shine a light on more accurate way to estimate climate change

It doesn't matter if it's a forest, a soybean field, or a prairie, all plants take up carbon dioxide during photosynthesis -- the process where they use sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into food. During this changeover, the plants emit an energy "glow" that is not visible to the human eye, but can be detected by satellites in space. Now, researchers at the University of New Hampshire have taken that one step further. By using satellite data from different major land-based ecosystems around the globe, they have found that the photosynthesis glow is the same across all vegetation, no matter the location. This first-of-its-kind global analysis could have significance in providing more accurate data for scientists working to model carbon cycle and eventually help better project climate change.

"The importance of these results is that rather than look at several different types of data and computer-based models from information collected on the ground to monitor plant photosynthesis across the globe, using the satellite observations will provide a near real-time option that is simple, reliable and fast," said Jingfeng Xiao, a UNH research associate professor and the principal investigator on the study recently published in the journal Global Change Biology.

Plants across the globe are a major carbon sink helping to remove carbon from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. Because of this, accurate photosynthesis estimates are crucial for scientists who examine ecosystem functions, carbon cycling, and feedbacks to the climate. The challenge has been in the ground-based data scientists previously used to estimate it, including air temperature, solar radiation, precipitation, and other information used in computer-based Earth systems models that focus on the carbon cycle. However, those calculations have large variations that can affect results.

To measure the amount of carbon taken up by plants through photosynthesis, known as gross primary productivity (GPP), scientists have increasingly been measuring the energy glow of plants, called solar-induced fluorescence (SIF). This light that is emitted through the leaf is found at the high end of the light spectrum. While scientists have used this data for specific biomes, or distinct biological communities like a forest or a desert, this study is the first to look at the relationship between ground-based GPP and satellite-observed SIF in different areas across the globe -- from grasslands to mixed forests and even areas with sparse vegetation.

Researchers collected the SIF data for plants in eight major biomes, or ecosystem types, from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite and found that it didn't matter where the plants were, that just like earlier studies in single areas, where there was more SIF, the plants took up more carbon from photosynthesis, and vice versa. Xiao's research establishes this universal relationship across eight major ecosystem types and shows that SIF can indeed serve as a proxy for more time-intensive calculations.

"This is a big step towards being able to solely rely on satellite measurements," said Xiao. "Because it is a very simple model it could help reduce uncertainty in the data, lower computational costs and help better project climate change."

This is the first time the OCO-2 has been used in a global analysis based on SIF observations. In addition, the direct universal relationship revealed in this study allows the estimation of photosynthesis without knowing the ecosystem type. This is especially important for areas of the globe where the satellite might not have reliable, fine-scale data on the vegetation type. Xiao is currently working on developing global SIF estimates for areas ranging on the scale of a few to tens of square kilometers, which he says will be useful for the scientific community studying these topics.

[starhasarrived]

OCO-2 Night Launch Image Credit & Copyright: Rick Baldridge

Source

[linesindonesia-blog]

Satelit OCO-2 Pemantau Karbon Dioksida

Satelit OCO-2 Pemantau Karbon Dioksida

Lines – Suatu alat telah diciptakan untuk membantu memantau deforestasi (perusakan hutan), penegakan hukum yang telah disepakati bersama untuk hal tersebut, dan juga memberi para ilmuwan informasi rinci asal muasal karbon dioksida dan ke mana perginya.

Deforestasi menyumbang 10 – 15 persen emisi gas rumah kaca (GRK) global. Draft perjanjian Paris mengukuhkan program pemberian imbalan keuangan…

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[earthstory]

A year of CO2

In 2014, NASA launched the Orbital Carbon Observatory (2) satellite, OCO-2. Its job is to measure CO2 emissions around the world at fine scales, showing where the true sources and sinks of carbon dioxide are around the world.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas. When the sun warms earth’s surface, that heat is released as infrared radiation (infrared light). CO2 absorbs some wavelengths of infrared light and therefore acts like a blanket; as the sun’s energy tries to leave the planet, CO2 grabs it and converts it back to heat.

CO2 is released by all sorts of processes. Right now, burning fossil fuels is by far the largest source on Earth. A secondary source is land use changes; releasing carbon locked in soils, wetlands, or forests to the atmosphere.

Over the last 200 or so years, humanity has released enough extra CO2 into the atmosphere to warm the planet by about 1 degree C - like throwing an extra thin blanket on top of the planet to keep the heat in.

This data from OCO-2 shows a year of CO2 around the world. There are many trends reflected. There is more land area in the northern hemisphere than the southern hemisphere, so every year during northern hemisphere summer when trees form their leaves and other plants grow, CO2 drops. Superimposed on that trend, there is a long term trend of increasing CO2, reflecting the amount released by humans during the year.

OCO-2 and systems like it can spot CO2 sources at fine scales: literally measuring each city block. As a consequence, its measurements will be key in implementing the agreement just struck in Paris at the latest UN organized conference to deal with climate change.

An agreement struck today sets the world on a possible path to limiting CO2 emissions enough to keep warming under 2 degrees C, with negotiable goals for the future of lowering emissions enough to aim for 1.5 degrees C. While that temperature change would still be a substantial disruption to the planet, the hope is it would be less than catastrophic to most of the people on Earth.

Satellites like OCO-2 can verify how much carbon is coming out of each source. Having measurements like this make it impossible for countries to cheat on this agreement without the rest of the world knowing it. Humanity has spent 200 years treating the atmosphere as a waste dump, but now that we understand how hazardous that behavior is, we’ve developed tools like this to track who is dumping what into our air.

The agreement at the #COP21 conference is a big, big deal. Climate Change is a geologic issue; humanity has become a force that can impact this planet at a level that threatens cities and nations. Finally in Paris today, an agreement between the nations of the world holds the promise of being a first step in controlling this impact. Now it needs to be accepted and expanded.

I felt nothing was more important than to show this OCO-2 data in another place with the agreement accepted by all the meeting nations today. This single year of data shows the problem. Hopefully now we’re on a path to at least limiting how big of a problem it is.

-JBB

Image credit: NASA/OCO-2 http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=87146&src=twitter-iotd

[rjzimmerman]

From NASA:

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite is providing NASA’s first detailed, global measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the Earth’s surface. OCO-2 recently released its first full year of data — critical to analyzing the annual cycle carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

[papercraftsquare]

New Paper Craft: Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) Free Satellite Paper Model Download

New Papercraft has been published at PaperCraftSquare: Link: http://www.papercraftsquare.com/orbiting-carbon-observatory-2-oco-2-free-satellite-paper-model-download.html Paper Craft Name: Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) Free Satellite Paper Model Download Description:

This paper model is an Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2), an American environmental science satellite, the papercraft is created by Ghaspacer.

The OCO-2 satellite was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, based around the LEOStar-2 bus. The spacecraft is being used to study carbon dioxide concentrations and distributions in the atmosphere. For more information please click here.

You can download this papercraft model template here: Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) Free Satellite Paper Model Download [Box] [Gavitex]

For More infomaion please click on: http://www.papercraftsquare.com/orbiting-carbon-observatory-2-oco-2-free-satellite-paper-model-download.html More papercrafts, paper models, paper toys at PaperCraftSquare.com