China’s CO2 monitoring satellite tv for pc reviews a worldwide CO2 community of six gigatons – watts with that?

INSTITUTE OF ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICS, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

Research news

PICTURE: THE FIRST GLOBAL CARBON FLUX CARD ISSUED BY TANSAT OBSERVATIONS. Show More CREDIT: DONGXU YANG

About six gigatons – roughly 12 times the mass of all living people – of carbon appear to be emitted over land each year, according to data from the Chinese Experimental Global Scientific Satellite for Carbon Dioxide Monitoring (TanSat).

Using data on the mixing of carbon with dry air collected from May 2017 to April 2018, the researchers developed the first global carbon flux dataset and map. They published their results in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

The map was developed by applying TanSat’s satellite observations to models showing how greenhouse gases are exchanged between the atmosphere, land, water and living organisms. More than a hundred gigatons of carbon are exchanged during this process, but the increase in carbon emissions has resulted in net carbon being added to the atmosphere – now about six gigatons per year – which is a serious problem that is contributing to climate change. according to Dongxu Yang, first author and researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IAP CAS).

“In this paper, we present the first implementation of TanSat carbon dioxide data for carbon flux estimates,” said Yang. “We are also showing that China’s first carbon monitoring satellite can study the distribution of carbon flux around the world.”

While satellite measurements are not as accurate as ground-based measurements, said co-author Jing Wang, a researcher at IAP CAS, satellite measurements provide continuous global observation coverage that provides additional information that is not available from limited or disparate surface monitoring stations. For example, a monitoring station in a city may report very different observations than a station in a remote village, especially if they are in a drastically different climate.

“The sparse and spatial inhomogeneity of the existing ground-based network limits our ability to infer consistent carbon sources and sinks on a global and regional basis,” said co-author Liang Feng, researcher at the National Center for Earth Observation at the University of Edinburgh. “To improve observation coverage, bespoke satellites, such as TanSat, have been developed to enable accurate atmospheric greenhouse gas measurements.”

The data from these satellites, which include TanSat, Japan’s GOSAT and the US OCO-2, as well as future missions, will be used to independently review national emissions inventories around the world. According to Yang, this process will be overseen by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and will begin in 2023 to support the Paris Agreement. The measurements from TanSat generally agree with the data from the other satellites.

“This verification method will be helpful to better understand CO2 emissions in real time and ensure transparency across inventories,” said co-author Yi Liu, researcher at IAP CAS.

The process is supported by the next generation of satellites, known as TanSat-2, which is currently in the design phase. The goal, Yang said, will be to get measurements that will help clarify the carbon budget from the global scale to individual cities.

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TanSat, funded by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology and the China Meteorological Administration, was launched in December 2016.

From EurekAlert!

Link to the full paper without paywall.

abstract.

Space-based measurements of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations provide global observation constraints for top-down estimates of surface carbon flux. Presented here are the first estimates of the global distribution of surface carbon fluxes derived from measurements of the dry air CO2 columns (XCO2) of the Chinese Global Carbon Dioxide Monitoring Science Satellite (TanSat). An Ensemble Transformation Kalman Filter (ETKF) data assimilation system coupled with GEOS-Chem’s global chemical transport model is used to optimally match model simulations with the TanSat XCO2 observations obtained using the Institute’s carbon dioxide retrieval algorithm of Atmospheric Physics for remote satellite sensors (IAPCAS). A large reduction in posterior error (30–50%) compared to a priori flows indicates that the assimilation of satellite XCO2 measurements offers highly effective constraints on estimating global carbon flow. Their effects are also highlighted by significant spatiotemporal shifts in flow patterns across regions that are critical to the global carbon balance, such as tropical South America and China. An integrated global net carbon flux of 6.71 ± 0.76 Gt C yr − 1 over 12 months (May 2017-April 2018) is estimated from the TanSat XCO2 data, which is generally combined with other inversions based on satellite data such as the JAXA. matches GOSAT and NASA OCO-2 XCO2 requests. However, discrepancies have been found in some regional river estimates, particularly in the southern hemisphere where there may still be uncorrected biases between satellite measurements due to the lack of independent reference observations. The results of this study form the basis for further studies using current or future TanSat XCO2 data together with other surface- and space-based measurements to quantify the carbon exchange between the biosphere and the atmosphere.

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