Orbiting Carbon News Today

The natural cycles of the surface-to-atmosphere fluxes of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other important greenhouse gases are changing in response to human influences. These changes need to be quantified to understand climate change and its impacts, but this is difficult to do because natural fluxes occur over large spatial and temporal scales and cannot be directly observed. Flux inversion is a technique that estimates the spatiotemporal distribution of a gas’ fluxes using observations of the gas�...

The lack of accurate CO₂ and methane emissions data has hindered the efforts to reduce emissions. Recognizing the urgent need for a reliable monitoring scheme, a team at the World Bank launched an initiative to leverage satellite-based measurements to fill the information gap.

Canadian firm GHGSaT Inc., announced the successful launch of a satellite dedicated to quantifying carbon dioxide released by facilities

Solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence, or SIF, is a part of the natural process of photosynthesis. SIF can be measured from space by instruments such as the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), making it a useful proxy for monitoring gross primary production (GPP), which is a critical component of Earth’s carbon cycle. The complex physical relationship between SIF and GPP is frequently studied using OCO-2 observations of SIF since they offer the finest spatial resolution available. However,...

Katrina MillerWhen meteorologist John Haynes moved to Washington, DC, 20 years ago, he could stand on the rooftop of NASA headquarters and see airborne

Earths carbon dioxide super-emitters have been revealed in a new NASA map that shows just how much greenhouse gases are being pumped out by more than 100 countries.

NASA scraps the GeoCarb mission, a satellite intended to monitor climate change to prioritize tracking greenhouse gas emissions. The organization, however, maintains that it is still committed to researching climate change research.

A new way for journalists to get more accurate numbers on global greenhouse gas emissions was introduced by former Vice President Al Gore at the recent United Nations’ climate change gathering in Egypt. Reporter’s Toolbox looks under the hood of Climate Trace, which is the result of work by more than 100 collaborators and compiles data from some 300 specialized satellites and

To better track carbon pledges and support mitigation finance, World Bank researchers have developed a new database and web facility that place carbon data at the user’s fingertips.

We show new results from an updated version of the Fast atmOspheric traCe gAs retrievaL (FOCAL) retrieval method applied to measurements of the Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT) and its successor GOSAT-2. FOCAL was originally developed for estimating the total column carbon dioxide mixing ratio (XCO2) from spectral measurements made by the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2). However, depending on the available spectral windows, FOCAL also successfully retrieves total column amounts...