The Carbon Club: Measuring and Mapping Carbon Dioxide from Remote Sensing Satellite Data

Abstract

This talk is about environmental informatics for global remote sensing of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas. An important compartment of the carbon cycle is atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), where it (and other gases) contribute to climate change through a greenhouse effect. There are CO2 observational programs where measurements are made at a small number of ground-based locations at somewhat regular time intervals. In contrast, satellite-based programs are spatially global but do not have the temporal richness. A recent satellite launched to measure CO2 is NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), whose principal objective is to retrieve a geographical distribution of CO2 sources and sinks. OCO-2’s measurement of column-averaged mole fraction, XCO2, is designed to achieve this, through a data-assimilation procedure that is statistical at its basis. Consequently, uncertainty quantification is key, starting with retrieval of the atmospheric state from each individual sounding, to mapping the state with spatial-statistical models, to flux-inversion using flux-process models.