#AGU14 NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory shows surprising CO2 emissions in Southern Hemisphere

 Global Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from Oct. 1 through Nov. 11, as recorded by NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2. Carbon dioxide concentrations are highest above northern Australia, southern Africa and eastern Brazil. Preliminary analysis of the African data shows the high levels there are largely driven by the burning of savannas and forests. Elevated carbon dioxide can also be seen above industrialized Northern Hemisphere regions in China, Europe and North America. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from Oct. 1 through Nov. 11, as recorded by NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2. Carbon dioxide concentrations are highest above northern Australia, southern Africa and eastern Brazil. Preliminary analysis of the African data shows the high levels there are largely driven by the burning of savannas and forests. Elevated carbon dioxide can also be seen above industrialized Northern Hemisphere regions in China, Europe and South America and Africa. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The first global maps of atmospheric carbon dioxide from NASA’s new Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission demonstrate its performance and promise, showing elevated carbon dioxide concentrations across the Southern Hemisphere from springtime biomass burning.

At a media briefing today at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California; Colorado State University (CSU), Fort Collins; and the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, presented the maps of carbon dioxide and a related phenomenon known as solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence and discussed their potential implications.

A global map covering Oct. 1 through Nov. 17 shows elevated carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere above northern Australia, southern Africa and eastern Brazil.

“Preliminary analysis shows these signals are largely driven by the seasonal burning of savannas and forests,” said OCO-2 Deputy Project Scientist Annmarie Eldering, of JPL. The team is comparing these measurements with data from other satellites to clarify how much of the observed concentration is likely due to biomass burning.

The time period covered by the new maps is spring in the Southern Hemisphere, when agricultural fires and land clearing are widespread. The impact of these activities on global carbon dioxide has not been well quantified. As OCO-2 acquires more data, Eldering said, its Southern Hemisphere measurements could lead to an improved understanding of the relative importance in these regions of photosynthesis in tropical plants, which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and biomass burning, which releases carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

The early OCO-2 data hint at some potential surprises to come. “The agreement between OCO-2 and models based on existing carbon dioxide data is remarkably good, but there are some interesting differences,” said Christopher O’Dell, an assistant professor at CSU and member of OCO-2’s science team. “Some of the differences may be due to systematic errors in our measurements, and we are currently in the process of nailing these down. But some of the differences are likely due to gaps in our current knowledge of carbon sources in certain regions — gaps that OCO-2 will help fill in.”

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has no distinguishing features to show what its source was. Elevated carbon dioxide over a region could have a natural cause — for example, a drought that reduces plant growth — or a human cause. At today’s briefing, JPL scientist Christian Frankenberg introduced a map using a new type of data analysis from OCO-2 that can help scientists distinguish the gas’s natural sources.

Through photosynthesis, plants remove carbon dioxide from the air and use sunlight to synthesize the carbon into food. Plants end up re-emitting about one percent of the sunlight at longer wavelengths. Using one of OCO-2’s three spectrometer instruments, scientists can measure the re-emitted light, known as solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF). This measurement complements OCO-2’s carbon dioxide data with information on when and where plants are drawing carbon from the atmosphere.

“Where OCO-2 really excels is the sheer amount of data being collected within a day, about one million measurements across a narrow swath,” Frankenberg said. “For fluorescence, this enables us, for the first time, to look at features on the five- to 10-kilometer scale on a daily basis.” SIF can be measured even through moderately thick clouds, so it will be especially useful in understanding regions like the Amazon where cloud cover thwarts most spaceborne observations.

The changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide that OCO-2 seeks to measure are so small that the mission must take unusual precautions to ensure the instrument is free of errors. For that reason, the spacecraft was designed so that it can make an extra maneuver. In addition to gathering a straight line of data like a lawnmower swath, the instrument can point at a single target on the ground for a total of seven minutes as it passes overhead. That requires the spacecraft to turn sideways and make a half cartwheel to keep the target in its sights.

The targets OCO-2 uses are stations in the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON), a collaborative effort of multiple international institutions. TCCON has been collecting carbon dioxide data for about five years, and its measurements are fully calibrated and extremely accurate. At the same time that OCO-2 targets a TCCON site, a ground-based instrument at the site makes the same measurement. The extent to which the two measurements agree indicates how well calibrated the OCO-2 sensors are.

Additional maps released today showed the results of these targeting maneuvers over two TCCON sites in California and one in Australia. “Early results are very promising,” said Paul Wennberg, a professor at Caltech and head of the TCCON network. “Over the next few months, the team will refine the OCO-2 data, and we anticipate that these comparisons will continue to improve.”

To learn more about OCO-2, visit:

http://oco2.jpl.nasa.gov/

Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

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December 20, 2014 11:22 am

“Preliminary analysis shows these signals are largely driven by the seasonal burning of savannas and forests,” – that’s utter crap! Compare to Google Earth – the red areas are rain-forests! As Murry Salby has been saying – the largest CO2 sources on land are rain forests:

jmorpuss
Reply to  Mišo Alkalaj
December 20, 2014 12:07 pm

Trees Exhale as much CO2 as they inhale http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/bot00/bot00191.htm

Robert of Ottawa
Reply to  jmorpuss
December 20, 2014 3:50 pm

Not true. Plants both respire and photosynthesize. The latter uses more CO2 than the former.

Reply to  Mišo Alkalaj
December 20, 2014 12:53 pm

Yep – rain forests. Plus chinese power stations and industries. Some indication of the west pacific warm pools starting to warm up and beginning to out-gas? I suspect this is already being rigged. I’m tempted to press the bs button. That range of values, 387 – 402.5 seems highly questionable. I know from my own reasonably well calibrated measurements here on the western edge of the Coral Sea, that the level is rarely less than 400 ppm, but goes up to around 425 ppm after sunset.

Robert of Ottawa
Reply to  Mišo Alkalaj
December 20, 2014 2:47 pm

See my comment in the future at 2.41 PM

martyn
December 20, 2014 11:33 am

Who planted those bloody forests?

am
December 20, 2014 11:38 am

I would state that some of the burning in southern Africa is not for agricultural purposes but to clear bush to allow easy search for alluvial gold by metal detectors.

Crispin in Waterloo
Reply to  am
December 20, 2014 3:23 pm

Biomass burning in Southern Africa peaks in dry season (duh) which is over by October. Mostly July-August.
Forests produce lots of CO2 from decomposition of plant material.
Anyone remember the big methane clouds found over forests when the methane measuring satellite first went up?
Forests are not net sources of O2 – the so-called “lungs of the world”. Rotting vegetarian absorbs a great deal of O2 to produce all that CO2. My, my how things don’t work the way they are supposed to.

am
Reply to  Crispin in Waterloo
December 22, 2014 7:11 am

These bush fires are common in the dry season. So they do contribute to this problem and it was no surprise to me to see the satellite hotspot over Southern Africa.
If anyone looks up any old farming book and the difficulty of retaining humus because of the heat, in certain parts of Africa, then you will see there is a natural release of carbon through heat by the sun, in grassland areas, never mind forests.

Jimbo
December 20, 2014 11:59 am

What is going on in the Sahara?
In 2009 WUWT had: “Some preliminary results from GOSAT – CO2 hot spots in interesting places”
[GOSAT Worldwide CO2 – Carbon dioxide (column averaged dry air mole fraction) initial analysis (April 20-28 observation data) – click for larger image Source: JAXA]
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/20090829_ibuki_co2.jpg
[GOSAT Worldwide Methane – Methane (column averaged dry air mole fraction) initial analysis (April 20-28 observation data)- click for larger image Source: JAXA]
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/20090829_ibuki_ch4.jpg

Marcos
December 20, 2014 12:00 pm

my guess is that those red areas are from decaying (not burning) biomass and CO2 released by insects and microbes

December 20, 2014 12:04 pm

Deforestation and the destruction of life in the Amazon and elsewhere, NOT industry. I knew it!
I have been shaking with fury at the lying “greens” for a long time over the temperature nonsense. But something devastating HAS been going on. And that provides an opportunity to get them on our side at last, for in order to fix anything, you have to be more than half right already, and these people are already concerned about the real problem: monstrous agriculture.
Modern agriculture is based on poisons and on animal cruelty. Organic is not always better, but organic methods exist that outperform the poison methods. One is Sonic Bloom (TM). Go to http://www.originalsonicbloom.com and enjoy the site; then purchase a kit for yourself or a greenie friend.
JUMP on this: the iron is hot right now.

Rud Istvan
Reply to  ladylifegrows
December 20, 2014 1:30 pm

With all due respect, without ‘monstrous agriculture’, ‘ poisons’, and ‘animal cruelty’ billions of humans would have already starved to death. Us farmers do try to reduce ‘poisons’ by manuring fields to reduce synthetic fertilizer cost, and planting GMO crops to reduce pesticide cost where and when those things make sense and are permitted. The yield miracle of dwarf IR8 rice in Asia REQUIRES synthetic fertilizer and herbicides, one reason it is not more widespread in places like Thailand.
My dairy cattle don’t experience a whole lot of animal cruelty until the last second at the top of the stairway to heaven, on the way to their final resting place at McDonalds. Perhaps you are a vegetarian. I worked on a large scale German hog farm one summer (thousands of hogs/year, fourth largest in Germany at the time). We babied them in their growing pens with dosed food, contant manure removal, even scenery rotation (ever larger pens are needed as hogs mature in size over 9 months). You cannot have free range hogs, since they root everything up.
Perhaps you are thinking free range chicken with all else being chicken cruelty. Can be done at moderate scale for 2-3x the cost of what you pay now with present rearing method costs. Never seemed to find chickens complaining much either way. Hard to know as I don’t speak chicken.
Given the worlds population, it is impossible to return to the romanticized farming methods still practiced by the Amish. They work, but don’t scale any more than a back yard victory garden.

Reply to  Rud Istvan
December 21, 2014 1:18 am

Rud says:
…I don’t speak chicken.
That’s a clucking shame. Good post, though. A needed dose of reality…

François
December 20, 2014 12:09 pm

You got a bit of a problem, you A- H (s) Temperatures are definitely going up, not down, as you would like them to.
Odd, some algorythm fucks up whatever I write,. You got semething against the French? Thought you hated models? I never typed a typed a k? So why did you make it appear?

Bruce Cobb
Reply to  François
December 20, 2014 1:36 pm

Sleep it off, you’ll feel better in the morning. Comprennez-vous?

rogerknights
December 20, 2014 12:10 pm

“above northern Australia”
Why didn’t they say, “over Indonesia”?

Chris Schoneveld
Reply to  rogerknights
December 21, 2014 1:07 am

I was thinking the same. It is lack of knowledge of geography. Americans think that Holland is a province of Denmark or vice versa :-). Bush, before he became president, did’t even have a passport (so it was rumoured).

Reply to  Chris Schoneveld
December 21, 2014 1:14 am

Hi Chris,
GWB traveled to other countries. I don’t know if he had a passport, but I don’t think a President needs one.

Charles Nelson
December 20, 2014 12:30 pm

Why would anyone be ‘surprised’ by this?
Just goes to show that many scientists live in a bubble and have no knowledge of the actual world.

Charles Nelson
Reply to  Charles Nelson
December 20, 2014 12:34 pm

Also interesting to note from the map that there appears to be no elevated CO2 levels over the most densely populated and industrialised parts of the world!

Editor
December 20, 2014 12:31 pm

To my mind, they’re not looking at this biomass/CO2 thing reasonably. Take Northern Australia for example: fires burn across the land every yea. The total amount of vegetation doesn’t change over the years, nor does the quality of the soil. So the whole fire-growth-fire sequence is atmospheric-CO2-neutral. Now look at old-growth Brazilian forest : no change in biomass, no build-up in the soil, ergo atmospheric-CO2-neutral. The Amazon forests are not an active CO2 sink, they are an ex CO2 sink.

Rud Istvan
Reply to  Mike Jonas
December 20, 2014 12:56 pm

That seems about right. The two big biosphere carbon sinks are temperate soils (both forest and Grassland) where organic carbon residues can build up indefinitely by simply increasing ‘topsoil’ thickness, and the oceans where organisms like coccolithophorids sequester carbon in precipitated mineral carbonates (in the coccolith’s case, as chalk). The rest is mostly a recycling wash but for land use changes. The biggest chunk of biogenically stored carbon is not coal or oil. It is several hundred million years of miles thick sedimentary limestone and dolomite basins, and their metamorphic (marble) equivalents.

Pete in Cumbria
Reply to  Rud Istvan
December 21, 2014 6:42 am

You’re so close to my way of thinking Rud (also being a farmer)
BUT, I’ll put tyou the question I’m presently putting to as many farmers as I meet, namely:
How does nitrogen fertiliser work, what does it ACTUALLY do?
Universally I am met with blank faces and I will admit that I never gave it a second thought while using 35+ tonnes of the stuff annually. This is especially as its called ‘fertiliser’ so you would imagine that by adding it to the land, you would be increasing the fertility of the land. Yes/No??
It took a reading of The Vegetarian Myth, and just one small phrase in there that said something along the lines of.. ‘ soil bacteria chew up organic matter in the soil and plants, basically, suck up and use the ensuing slop’
Hence how nitrogen fertiliser works, it drives the soil bacteria into a feeding frenzy (being their previously limited nutrient) and they produce many times more digestate that the plants use to grow bigger and faster than they otherwise would.
This digestate is acidic, it attacks the mineral fraction of the soil releasing the myriad trace elements/nutrients from otherwise alkaline/basic rock and that the plants need. Also why, as most farmers will tell you, nitrogen fertiliser acidifies your soil, unless of course you’re farming on chalky ground.
But the bacteria also produce huge amounts of CO2, presumably some of which expailns the increased soil acidity and some escapes to the atmosphere. Growing plants will try and capture some of that and nature tended to make them as tall a practicable to do just that. Hence trees are big things and also native grasses, including the ancestors of wheat barley etc. Tall plants protect the soil and shelter it, enabling them to catch more of the microbe created CO2 before it blows away in the breeze.
It all fits perfectly with the CO2 graph, ramping up as it does when it does (the arrival of nitrogen fertiliser ‘in bulk’ on farms just after WW2) and also dwarf varieties of agricultural crops.
Look again at that satellite map and think ‘farmland’ and lets see whht it does in 5 or 6 months time in the northern hemisphere.
Thre reduction of soil organic matter also fits with the torrents of dirty water we see on news programs, muddy fields that farmers complain about (blaming climate change of course) and also rising readings on thermometers, less soil organic = less retained moisture= bigger diurnal temperature swings.
It all fits so well. All the graphs point to the arrival of the oxymornically named nitrogen fertiliser on the world’s farmland.

GTR
Reply to  Rud Istvan
December 22, 2014 3:50 am

@Pete – these guys produce a fertilizer with lots of minerals (including Plutonium?) by extracting them from a seawater:
http://www.ocean-grown.com/elements.html
It’s seriously overpriced, and sold to green/natural funamentalists:
http://www.oceansolution.com/Seawater-Minerals-Interview-with-Mike-Adams.pdf

am
Reply to  Rud Istvan
December 22, 2014 9:58 am

A reply to Pete Below as no link for reply under his comment.
Your comment on nitrogen is accurate as to its effect on soil. What you miss is the level of fertiliser in Southern Africa, which is the lowest in the world, probably less than 20kg compound D per hectare on average, but certainly tiny, and not at all able to account for the increase of co2 in the satellite map by arrival of fertiliser as you suggest. Southern Africa has two distinct seasons dry and wet. On the arrival of the rains there is an identified and purely natural nitrogen flush. This is due to the activity of said beasties and the creation of nitrogen naturally. It lasts about 4-6 weeks after the start of the rains. Farmers who don’t plant early lose this benefit.
Compost pits heat up. So do kraals full of cattle manure. Of these latter there are millions in Southern Africa. Forests are a bit like compost pits. You don’t need to start fires for them to emit something. I don’t think that many of the thoughts in this thread are accurate on the subject of infertile soils, in Southern Africa, at least. Many are clay loams and labelled as inherently fertile by the agricultural departments. If they are manured regularly, which they are not, then they become exhausted but can easily be recovered by manure and lime or even fertiliser.

u.k.(us)
December 20, 2014 12:40 pm

…”The changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide that OCO-2 seeks to measure are so small that the mission must take unusual precautions to ensure the instrument is free of errors. For that reason, the spacecraft was designed so that it can make an extra maneuver. In addition to gathering a straight line of data like a lawnmower swath, the instrument can point at a single target on the ground for a total of seven minutes as it passes overhead. That requires the spacecraft to turn sideways and make a half cartwheel to keep the target in its sights.”…..
==============
And it glimpses the trees, never mind the forest ?

Reply to  u.k.(us)
December 20, 2014 1:28 pm

This way it can use up its fuel faster and require more multimillion dollar taxpayer investments in yet another one of these orbiting guessing games thereby continuing to employ people with money that could have been used to actually HELP mankind instead of attempting to quantify that which is not important*… e.g. CO2 levels.
*Except as a fictional bludgeon to be used against productive humanity.

December 20, 2014 12:54 pm

There is possibility that the instrumentation used isn’t effectively shielded from cosmic rays, and as result generating flawed data is. The band south of the equator (yellow strip in the illustration) is characterised by weak earth magnetic field,
http://www.liv.ac.uk/~holme/Img-main/fig1-small.gif
the most notably over south Atlantic (geomagnetic anomaly). A satellite/spacecraft could experience a 1000 times increase in radiation exposure passing the South Atlantic Anomaly. Cause is highly energetic particles impacting electronic circuits, in past satellites have been permanently lost, while ISS results to often if not regular rebooting its computers. This could explain strong patches over the ocean, while Greenland one could be caused by solar CMEs proton storms (cause of aurora) affecting the polar areas.

Reply to  vukcevic
December 20, 2014 1:26 pm

The extent to which the two measurements agree indicates how well calibrated the OCO-2 sensors are.
Additional maps released today showed the results of these targeting maneuvers over two TCCON sites in California and one in Australia. “Early results are very promising,” said Paul Wennberg

So…. the calibration efforts so far are not “excellent”, not even “good”. They’re “promising”.

Reply to  davidmhoffer
December 20, 2014 1:34 pm

The OCO-2 team is currently developing techniques that will verify the observations of column averaged dry air mole fraction (Xco2) acquired from space.” (from the Validation page)
They not only haven’t calibrated it, they still don’t know how to validate the data once they do… and they’re trying to validate measurements of an averaged dry air column that doesn’t exist on this planet. It only exists in a computer model.

mpainter
Reply to  davidmhoffer
December 20, 2014 3:01 pm

So we have been conned again.

Reply to  davidmhoffer
December 20, 2014 4:35 pm

mpainter December 20, 2014 at 3:01 pm
So we have been conned again.

Conned would be a strong word in this case. The admission that the calibration process is on going and the results not yet validated is right there by their own admission. I just pointed it out because people are trying to draw conclusions from this data, and I think it is way to early to analyse the day lights out of it when its own proponents are admitting that it is early. Of course they use the word “promising” because they want to put a positive spin on it and lobby for more funding. There’s just no way they would come to the conference with a poster that said “the results so far aren’t proving accurate but we think with more time and funding we can fix it”.

Reply to  davidmhoffer
December 20, 2014 5:19 pm

We should judge science by its successes, not its failures.
The OCO-2 calibration process was discussed yesterday at the press conference, where they showed this plot.
http://i59.tinypic.com/15qq9gl.jpg
How would you rate these results? If OCO-2 and TCCON agree then the will points tend to lie on the X=Y diagonal.
I think it shows reasonable agreement between the values measured by OCO-2, compared to TCCON stations on the ground. So, ‘not bad’, eh?
Remember that the ground stations and OCO-2 are both using essentially the same spectrometers. But the ground stations have a tremendous advantage. They obtain their spectral absorption plots by merely pointing their instruments towards the Sun. On OCO-2 it is much more difficult. It has to decode the spectral lines from sunlight reflected from the oceans and ground.

mpainter
Reply to  davidmhoffer
December 20, 2014 7:31 pm

Well, if they are climate scientists they will never confess the defects.
I hate to be fooled twice.

Anymoose
December 20, 2014 1:09 pm

I hope that our “eminent” scientists recognize that every square inch of the Earth’s surface emits CO2 through organic decay, if it has four things: organic material, bacteria, moisture and warmth a bit above the temperature of your kitchen refrigerator. It is no surprise (to me) that the equatorial region produces CO2 through decay. This goes for land and water areas, equally.

Reply to  Anymoose
December 21, 2014 1:26 am

Yes, Prof Freeman Dyson wrote about that, too. He said that the top hundreth of an inch of topsoil is enough to absorb all human CO2. [source]
CO2 is simply not a problem. It is the classic Chicken Little scare. They say the sky is falling. But it’s only a tiny acorn.

Samuel C Cogar
December 20, 2014 1:32 pm

[quoting author of article] “A global map covering Oct. 1 through Nov. 17 shows elevated carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere above northern Australia, southern Africa and eastern Brazil.
———————–
Shure nuff, it does that every Springtime in the Southern Hemisphere immediately following the Autumnal Equinox on September 23rd of each year as denoted by NOAA’s 2014 monthly average Mona Loa CO2 ppm data, to wit:
—— mth ————– CO2 ppm ————–
2014 1 2014.042 397.80
2014 2 2014.125 397.91
2014 3 2014.208 399.59
2014 4 2014.292 401.27
2014 5 2014.375 401.83
2014 6 2014.458 401.15
2014 7 2014.542 399.00
2014 8 2014.625 397.01
2014 9 2014.708 395.28
2014 10 2014.792 395.93
2014 11 2014.875 397.13

Excerpted from: ftp://aftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/products/trends/co2/co2_mm_mlo.txt
So yup, the CO2 was elevated by 1.85 ppm during October and November. (And it will continue to elevate until about mid-May, or after the Spring equinox)
And it has been “steadily and consistently” doing the very same thing immediately following the Autumnal Equinox on September 23rd for the past 56+ years as denoted on this copy of the Keeling Curve Graph, to wit:
http://i1019.photobucket.com/albums/af315/SamC_40/keelingcurve.gif
[re-quoting a quote by author] ““Preliminary analysis shows these signals are largely driven by the seasonal burning of savannas and forests,” said OCO-2 Deputy Project Scientist Annmarie Eldering, of JPL. The team is comparing these measurements with data from other satellites to clarify how much of the observed concentration is likely due to biomass burning.
The time period covered by the new maps is spring in the Southern Hemisphere, when agricultural fires and land clearing are widespread.

———————-
Really now, ….. largely driven by springtime “burning” (oxidation) of savannas and forests, HUH?
And what about the massive amounts of springtime “burning” (oxidation) of all the dead biomass by microbial decomposition? The microbes really “love it” when springtime temperatures begin increasing and the dead biomass is damp enough for them to be ingesting said. (Refrigerator-Freezer Law)
And just what was/is responsible for “burning off” all of that atmospheric CO2 that was detected/measured way far off-shore out in the middle of the Southern Hemisphere oceans. Was there “Fire on the water”, ….. or what?
Do ya suppose those increasing springtime temperatures are causing the ocean waters in the Southern Hemisphere to warm back up from the winter’s cold and thus causing an outgassing of CO2?

george e. smith
Reply to  Samuel C Cogar
December 27, 2014 1:34 am

Well that annual cycle pretty much replicates the melting and refreezing of the arctic sea ice. Except in the arctic, the amplitude of the cycle is about 18-20 ppm, instead of 6 at ML

Latitude
December 20, 2014 1:58 pm

the red spot below Greenland is the tail end of a blob that came off NE U.S…….
Are they sure they are measuring OCO2 and not degenerated methane?…..no

son of mulder
December 20, 2014 1:59 pm

CO2 looks relatively low over the UK. Maybe that is because we import so much stuff from China yeut we (I mean the nutter greens in our government) still pretend that wind-turbines and solar panels are worth a heap of beans compared to nuclear and gas powered electricity generation. And I can’t help but point out that we in the UK have just had a relatively warm autumn/winter start yet CO2 levels are relatively low, discuss.

handjive
December 20, 2014 2:23 pm

Considering the timespan of this first reading, it would seem to confirm this:
“The Lima climate talks will produce more than 50,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, a record carbon footprint for any U.N. climate meeting measured, organizers say …”
It will be interesting to compare future satellite readings and note if the red clouds over Lima-Cusco dissipate permanently.
The Lima climate talks will produce more than 50,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, a record carbon footprint for any U.N. climate meeting measured, organizers say — though all that greenhouse gas pollution will be offset by host country Peru’s protection of forest, organizers say.
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/u-n-s-lima-climate-talks-have-biggest-carbon-footprint-n264836
Now that’s inconvenient.

December 20, 2014 2:26 pm

What we’re looking at (and picking apart) is a single graphic, representing some very preliminary and incomplete analysis, probably created as part of the content for the AGU presentation.
The first public release of the collected OCO2 data isn’t scheduled until 30-December-2014. Hopefully that product will be more complete and contain some actual source/sink analysis (for further picking apart).
http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCO-2/data-holdings/oco-2

Paul Arends
December 20, 2014 2:34 pm

I’m new to all this, but doesn’t the story make an unfounded assumption that the C02 emission being observed here is anthropogenic? I just happened to recently watch this presentation by Murry Salby (revelevant part starts at about 38 minutes in, and relevant image at 39:28) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ROw_cDKwc0
He makes the point that native (non-human) C02 emissions are driven mainly by temperature and soil moisture, and are therefore naturally banded around the equator, and in places where there is little human population or industrialization.

Ferdinand Engelbeen
Reply to  Paul Arends
December 20, 2014 5:04 pm

Paul, I had several questions for Salby, which still are unanswered, but the biosphere (plants + microbes + insects + animals) as a whole is a net sink for CO2. There are large movements of CO2 over the seasons, but these are more or less level off over a full cycle: some more sink than source…
Temperature is currently only a small player in the CO2 increase: historically not more than 8 ppmv/K.

Robert of Ottawa
December 20, 2014 2:41 pm

I’d like to see the other seasonal period pictures. It appears that the CO2 max is directly under the Sun, rather than over tropical vegetation. Yes, Brazil has the Amazon, but a great chunk of the red in Brazil is from savannah regions (known locally as Sertao). Also, in Africa, why is Equatorial Africa not right red? But drier, less tropical South Africa is?
I also note that a lot of Southern ocean is rich ion CO2, that beloved and important life-sustaining gas.

Reply to  Robert of Ottawa
December 20, 2014 2:48 pm

HI Robert
Please examine the 15fps AIRS data animation of global CO2 at
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/carbonDioxideSequence2002_2008_at15fps.mp4
Give it a minute to load, then enjoy this display of nature’s power..
Regards, Allan

Reply to  Allan MacRae
December 20, 2014 2:52 pm
Reply to  Allan MacRae
December 20, 2014 2:56 pm

One more try = the system keeps adding crud to the address.
If this does not work, just eliminate the quotation marks and everything outside them.
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/carbonDioxideSequence2002_2008_at15fps.mp4

Bruce Cobb
Reply to  Allan MacRae
December 20, 2014 4:04 pm

Must be a bug in the system.
[Fixed. ~mod.]

Robert of Ottawa
December 20, 2014 2:45 pm

Thinking about this, I think this photo demonstrates that insolation of the oceans causes CO2 to be released from it. Funny that init?

Latitude
December 20, 2014 3:04 pm

ok guys, stop guessing…
Drought releases CO2…..South America has been in a drought
Their rainy seaon doesn’t start until Nov……the map is Oct – Nov 11
What you’re looking at is a result of the drought
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/news/2014/020514b.html
http://robinwestenra.blogspot.com/2014/10/catastrophic-drought-in-brazil.html

December 20, 2014 3:07 pm

I take it that NASA or those who are using corrected values from NASA’s so called “reading” of CO2 in air, neither knows the direction not spead of streams, straights in open sea, I understand that they hardly learned the difference in saltination or the difference in CO2 in surface waterstreams from the CO2 values 4-10 meters under surface…
nor knows the simple fact that due to these parameters, they are looking in wrong dirctions for “causes”…..
Not much they know and use of basic facts/factors due to Natural forces. Does anyone of them have even the slightes knowledge of l the vulcanos under water during each stream, straights route to where the CO2 is “observed”?
NO they don’t
but then again, complicated algoritms using more than 40 known parabels they might not have learned studying basic matematic….
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the money gone?

Bruce Cobb
Reply to  norah4you
December 20, 2014 3:52 pm

Gone to grant-grubbing graveyards, every one.

Reply to  Bruce Cobb
December 20, 2014 6:43 pm

This summer a very intersting book was published in UK. The book might explain WHY so many never learnt basic facts nor was given the chance to understand basic first, deep understanding next in order to learn how to go on to understanding more than bits and pieces.
Daisy Christodoulou did a tough research in true Theories of Science-maner writing: Exploding Seven Myths about Education….
Guess what. In the 1960’s the wave of returning to Rousseau’s thoughts about Freedom and Learning started to have a major impact on teaching and learning in UK as well as US. (Sweden is an other example 1960-talet fortsätter skada den svenska skolan, <SvD ledarsidan 20 december 2014
The Seven Myths:
* Facts prevent understanding
* Teacher-led instruction is passive
* The 21st century fundamentally changes everything
* You can always just look it up
* We should teach transferable skills
* Projects and activities are the best way to learn
* Teaching knowledge is indoctrination.
How come this started in the 1960’s? Well I myself found three major reasons: In 1960’s the first of the War Children and those who like me were born in 1940’s grow up. Many who started having children compared to days before WWII. The well educated teacher my own generation had, had to first be “duplicated” and from late 70’s replaced so many more teachers had to be “found” and educated to make it possible to teach all the children growing up. But the third factor I myself found is the same as what caused the revolts around the World in 1968 – too many people became lefties… (Need I explain?)
Thus when the children of 1960’s and early 70’s grow up believing not only in an unfairness when some had high grades and some low the answer seemed to come from Sociology Studies of Society. Life isn’t always fair but some believed that it was a Human Right not only to have the basic school education that’s written in Human Rights but to have it anyway and that no one ought to stop them from having that no matter if they didn’t have proper understanding enough to go on to higher studies.
What we had, unfortunatly, is a less educated growing number of students at Universities from there on…. Quantity instead of Quality…
From a review:
But as Christodoulou is at pains to point out, what looks like a peculiarly contemporary antipathy to teaching knowledge, ‘this endless transmission of information’ as national curriculum architect Mick Waters disparagingly put it in 2012, actually has a rather long ancestry. ‘It is an intellectual legacy of the Romantic era’, she tells me, ‘with Rousseau its forefather. It’s not a recent phenomenon.’
Indeed, as Seven Myths makes clear, there has long been a tradition of thought in which teaching children facts, inculcating them, sometimes by rote, with particular areas of knowledge, has been viewed as detrimental to the child. As Rousseau put it in
Emile, ‘What is the use of inscribing on [children’s] brains a list of symbols which mean nothing to them?’.
Rousseau even went so far as to call such teaching methods ‘immoral’ on the grounds that fact-learning robs children of childhood. Again in the late nineteenth century, American philosopher John Dewey argued that teaching children maths or the dates of historical events, rather than letting them learn through their own experience, made them passive, the recipients of ‘a mass of meaningless and arbitrary ideas imposed from without’. And then, of course, there is Gradgrind, the Charles Dickens grotesque in Hard Times who, by famously insisting that ‘Facts alone are wanted in life’, left his pupils emotionally stunted – hardly a ringing endorsement of a knowledge-based education by that most canonical of authors.Exploding Seven Myths about Education, Daisy Christodoulou , a one-time University Challenge winner, UK secondary-school teacher, and now a researcher at ARK school. Review written by Deputy Editor Tim Black on spiked-on-line.com

mobihci
December 20, 2014 4:38 pm

the “Pacific ring of fire” seems well represented in that chart –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Ring_of_Fire
last friday another volcano went off in indonesia to add to the many recent events. above new zealand would be part of the under water ring. i just wonder if this is a good predictor for future events. eg there is a very large volcano in china that is set to blow soon.

ROM
December 20, 2014 5:40 pm

Come on guys ands gals!~
All that sciency sounding stuff about the satellite and it’s CO2 measurements has to be shouted loudly from the rooftops so as to appear to justify the very expensive, very new toy which rich Uncle Government with hefty donations from the Tax Mafia has so generously provided the where-with-all to pay for. So now we have a very expensive toy whizzing around over our heads. doing all those wondrous measurements which nobody has anyway of independently checking outside of the CO2 fixated climate sciency types.
The question is ; Will it make any damn difference to anybody or anything?
Maybe!
Unfortunately!
More taxes, more rules, more laws, more strictures on somebody somewhere to “Stop” those dangerous [ ??? ] CO2 emissions appearing where they do in that no doubt correctly “Adjusted” data.
And no doubt the inevitable demands that “somebody do something about all those “Carbon” emissions” or else they should pay compensation.
To whom the compensation goes to [ where it is supposed to come from; no need to ask ! ] of course is to be “negotiated” and the document MUST include a clause exempting the UN collectors and guardians of that compensation moneys from being liable for any cockups or unfortunate and permanent disappearances of very large amounts of the aforesaid and collected “Carbon” compensation moneys.
Will it make the slightest difference to the way in which Nature runs this planet?
Nope!
Sadly, after being a science fan and supporter for more than fifty of my 76 years I no longer trust any of these climate sciency types [ plus increasingly some in other disciplines ] such as the interpretation [ and “adjustments” ] of this satellite data, particularly those who are deep into anything to do with that nefarious “Carbon” of the green blob eco-fascist ideology, otherwise known as CO2 or Carbon Dioxide to the more rational and thinking members of the public.