from the Calgary Herald: Canadian mini-satellite may solve carbon puzzle (h/t to WUWT reader “Freezedried”)
Tom Spears Canwestnews Service
Friday, February 27, 2009
While NASA lost a $285-million US satellite this week, a Canadian microsatellite that does the same job is chugging along happily in orbit –at 1/1,000th the cost.
The 30-centimetre-long University of Toronto satellite is searching for the “missing” carbon dioxide–the vast amount of Earth’s main greenhouse gas that somehow vanishes each year.
That’s what NASA’s OCO(orbiting carbon observatory) satellite would have done, if it had survived launch on Tuesday. The big difference: Canada built and launched its tiny version for $300,000.
The OCO launched but failed to reach orbit. (see WUWT story here)
Details on the hardware are here
Meanwhile, the U of T’s CanX-2 is cruising 700 kilometres above Earth “and functioning really well,” after some glitches that followed its launch last April, said Ben Quine, the director of space engineering at York University–which made an instrument aboard the tiny CanX. Its job, like OCO’s, is to find Earth’s missing greenhouse gas.
“The measurement principle is almost exactly the same as the one for the OCO,”he said. “It’s very sad when you lose a spacecraft, but it also means that we are the only people in orbit with one-kilometre resolution on the ground.”
That means York’s Argus instrument can look at details below. A Japanese satellite does the same job, but can’t look at features less than 10 kilometres wide.
The problem is that where carbon dioxide comes from, and where it is sucked out of the atmosphere, remains poorly understood.
“Clearly, if we’re going to do something about climate change, we need to understand where CO2 is produced and particularly where it’s absorbed.That’s much less clear,” Quine said.
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MarkW (10:09:24) :
“Did the NASA satellite measure more than CO2? If not, why did it need to be so big?”
Couple of possibilities…
1) To carry along the CO2 that it was going to “measure”
2) To secretly place Al Gore’s Carbon footprint in space (hide it under the rug so to speak)
😉
tallbloke (15:03:25) :
“http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2009/02/jungle_fit.html
The trees have been getting fat on the excess co2. 🙂 ”
Very interesting paper – but wait, I thought increasing CO2 would led to Earth turning into Venus? Your author is clearly funded by Exxon.
Next you will be telling me that CO2 is not a pollutant.
The 1km resolution is making us safe for the moment. Should that resolution become 10 m, the chances this “scientific” tool would be used for political means such as CO2 quota per building, carbon taxation etc… would increase exponentially!
Robert Wood (16:37:57) :
“CO2 is heavy and tends to hug the Earth’s surface.”
Hmm… I read somewhere that ozone,O3, is a massy particle. Because of this it
tends to collect in a “layer” in the lower stratosphere. Now CO2 is only a smidgen
less massy than O3. So any excess CO2 that gets into the stratosphere should
behave in a similar fashion and absorb incoming LWR providing more cooling.
I posted something about this before, but I’m going to again.
When I was a kid we used to go camping for family vacations. My dad had the propane lantern, and a propane powered catalytic heater, and both used those little snap-in propane cans.
One day, while changing the propane in the lantern, the top broke off and it started spewing propane. He ran over and put the can in the middle of the (unused) gravel road near our campsite. We watched in fascination as the VISIBLE propane, even spraying straight up out of the can at some pressure, all dropped down to ground level and collected in the ditches beside the road. You could smell the propane for HOURS afterward, especially if you were a kid like me and crouched into the ditch.
Propane vehicles are usually not allowed in underground parkades for the same reason. Any leak, and it will pool into the low areas of the parkade and present an explosion hazard.
CO2 and Propane have almost the exact same specific gravity:
CO2 = 1.5189
Propane = 1.5219
where standard air is 1.0000
I have to believe that CO2 and Propane act the same way in the atmosphere.
Hahahaha, really enjoyed this post and comments. Going to bed now with a big smile on my face.
I hope that the results of this survey will not be buried if it doesn’t support the holy grail of Global warming.
And I’d like to point out that CO2 is no where close to being the “main greenhouse gas” in our atmosphere. The main greenhouse gas is water vapor, something not even being studied which given the increase in irrigation for farming in the last 30 years, is a mystery to me. Humans create far more water vapor then CO2 yet no one seems to be studying the effects that irrigation have on the atmosphere. I guess it comes down tot he same thing it does in politics, greed. Scientists can get lots of money as long as they mention CO2 and climate change in the same sentence. Too bad we wouldn’t support some real and serious research for a change.
It’s amazing to me all the remedies proposed for carbon dioxide emissions when we don’t even understand the carbon dioxide cycle yet!
This micro-satellite technology is very cool. Only $300k to build it and put it into orbit?
CodeTech, the smell was not that of propane but the H2S they add in it to give it an odor in order to easily detect leaks. Most likely the propane diffused quite rapidly but the H2S “sticks” to pretty much everything it comes in contact with. But be careful, it accumulates in the blood stream and it is poisonous in high concentration.
Pardon me but I am a numpty.
I thought we were already measuring CO2 – at 300+ ppm ?
Whats this satellitre for? If CO2 is different in different parts of the world then how valid is the current measurement?
Ray: it’s methyl mercaptan (CH3SH) they put in propane and natural gas, not H2S.
CH3SH and H2S if the subscript HTML didn’t work….
Ray, since I’m not 8 anymore, I’m pretty sure you won’t find me crouching in the ditch smelling the “propane” smell… lol
If UV can split H20 why couldn’t it split CO2?
Yeah Les, you are right, my mistake. In any case, just like propane, CO2 does not have odor or color… just the rotten smell of political manipulation of the masses.
Please see what the University of Toronto Institute of Aerospace Studies says about their CanX-2 satellite
http://www.utias-sfl.net/nanosatellites/CanX2/
My hunch is this:
The AIRS data is showing a mismatch between modeled net CO2 emission, which comes not from atmospheric measurements but from receipts of purchased fossil fuels and then some tweaking to take into account stored fuels that are not readily used, minus the other half of the equation for sinks which is also a modeled product, not a measurement. The AIRS data, which is an actual derived measurement (and yes it is derived so take it with caution), certainly shows an overall buildup of CO2 since, what, 1979, but the fluctuations, and I would imagine, the total amount today, do not match the modeled net emissions. The net amount, fluctuations and mixing patterns demonstrate far more sequestration fluctuation by the time the CO2 is up in the air where it is supposed to produce global, not local, warming. So additional satellites are being sent into space on a search mission to find where the missing CO2 is going.
Again, just my hunch, but I bet I am damed close. Or else why would these agencies be sending up any more satellites? It is just a matter of time before larger CO2 producing business start sending up their own to replicate, or call into question, the question of CO2 net emission. They will soon be sending their racing car sponsorship money to some private satellite industry instead so they can duplicated the 50 yard punt launch of the Canadian satellite and collect their own gawddamndata.
Remember too that CO2 measuring stations are put into places where CO2 is being emitted. There are far fewer stations in places where there is little CO2 to measure. To make assumptions based on data from CO2 increasing pumps is the same mistake used when talking about temperature data from only those stations that show an increase.
“”” Bob Wood (21:18:48) :
If UV can split H20 why couldn’t it split CO2? “””
Bob, where did you read that UV can split H2O ?
We know for sure that UV can split O2 into atomic Oxygen; which enjoys being by itself like the plague, so it latches onto another O2 molecule in a hurry, to form O3 ozone. I suppose in principle three Os could meet up to make ozone, but given that the split is going to send the two Os off in opposite directions, it’s pretty unlikely that thoise two would participate in a new three way join venture, whereas a lone O will attack the next O2 it encounters which should be PDQ.
UV that short, doesn’t propagate very deep into the atmosphere, and remember that O2 is 55 times more prevalent than CO2, so the odds don’t favor very short UV breaking up CO2, or water for that matter. The longer UV that causes sunburn does not appear to bother CO2.
Simplest evidence for that is the Air-Mass one solar spectrum (ground level) which shows water absorption starting around 750 nm; whereas CO2 doesn’t show any solar spectrum absorption before you get to 1.9 microns in the iR, and that causes a molecular vibration; which I think is the symmetrical stretch mode, where the C stays still and the two Os move in opposite directions in the line of the molecule, exactly out of phase with each other. The Assymmetrical stretch mode where all three atoms move, but the CM stays put is I believe the 4 micron IR line of CO2.
The symmetrical stretch mode is not supposed to be very IR active, since the charge center doesn’t move, but stays cental to the Carbon atom. That should mean that the molecule has no dipole moment, in that mode of vibration, so the antenna strength is not very good.
My atmospheric absorption spectra shows O2 +O3 having 100% absorption below 280 nm, with a little glitch around 200, which could be where the O2 split takes place There’s some sort of O2+O3 spike right at 0.7 microns, and it is very narrow, so I would guess it is some sort of Ozone line, or at least happens at high altitude where temperature, and pressure broadening are much lower.
George
Pamela Gray (07:50:37) :
Pamela, the AIRS satellite data were calibrated, using the baseline station data at height + several inflight data over different parts of the globe. Thus there is no mismatch between the satellite and the stations like Mauna Loa and the south pole, and both show the same trends, including seasonal variation for the same places.
Morover, the accuracy of the AIRS satellite is in the order of +/- 5 ppmv (compared to 0.1 ppmv for the baseline stations), not even fine enough to see the trend of a few years emissions in itself, and the “view” is from a few km height on. But with the calibration, the trends can be seen, and the spatial distribution made visible by the satellite coverage is the real advantage…
The new satellite(s) will show CO2 emissions/absorptions from ground level up, where the real exchanges take place. While the yearly emissions and CO2 levels are known with reasonable accuracy, the exact places and amounts of natural (seasonal) sinks and sources are only roughly quantified and this will show where they are…
Pamela Gray (08:28:39) :
The baseline stations are by definition put at places where NO important emissions and sinks are present! That is mainly over the oceans (or coastal stations with mainly seaside wind) and preferentially at high altitude. These are the stations which show the same increasing trend over the past 50 years, from near the north pole to the south pole and from sea level to 3,400 m (+ airplane and balloon measurements higher up). That is for 95% of the atmosphere, the same trends within a few ppmv…
There are a lot of stations at places where huge emissions and sinks are present (that is in 5% of the atmosphere), but these are put there exactly to measure the regional in/out flux of mainly vegetation, see e.g. the Ameriflux network:
http://public.ornl.gov/ameriflux/about-objective.shtml
Or the tall tower projects in Europe:
http://www.chiotto.org/cabauw.html
The new satellite(s) should do the same job, but with a far better coverage.
We all know that the CO2 concentration has risen to 385 ppm per Mona Laua measurements and I beleive we can identify fossil fuel contribution to this increse by specific CO2 isotopes. What percentage of the current 385 ppm concentration can be attributed to fossil fuels and which isotope is the key marker?
Bill
Science is more complicated than I, a laymen, could imagin. But I think maybe CO2 still is trapped somewhere on or around the earth, instead to flying away, due to the gravity.