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:
Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
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Reblogged this on Norah4you's Weblog and commented:
As I written in a comment below:
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
So what was 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. A numerous number who started having children compared to days before WWII. The well educated teacher my own generation had had, had to first be “dublicated” and from late 70’s replaced so many more teachers had to be “found” and educated to make it possible to teach all the newborn children when 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 had proper understanding enough to go on to higher studies.
What we had, unfortunatly in my opinion is a less educated growing number of students at University’s 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
—- my comment is a reason why I myself, from beginning Liberal, became a Conservative voter
Very disappointed.
The “Global” map is only from +60 N to -60S.
Errors of the retrieval algorithm can be spotted in particular the southern polar cap, which program managers strategically eliminated if it exists.
Near the +60N line between souther Greenland and Iceland is a strong “source”!
Perhaps the OCO-2 Managers would observe, “Oh Yes! [cough] [cough] Most unfortunate … as we say.”
😉
Strong CO2 concentration at the southern tip of Greenland (AFAIK) could not have any of the considered causes, thus I suspect instrumentation malfunction due the inadequate shielding. This would apply to both polar regions, hence my comment above:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/20/agu14-nasas-orbiting-carbon-observatory-shows-surprising-co2-emissions-in-southern-hemisphere/#comment-1818289
Interesting about the 60 degree limits. The satellite is in a slightly retrograde polar orbit (98.22 degrees inclination) so it seems like it should “mow the lawn” every 24 hours.
Correction, about every 1.6 days, but its field of view is incredibly narrow and highly affected by cloud cover. That would explain the more than 2 weeks it takes to cover the whole planet but I still don’t understand the 60 degrees, unless there isn’t enough sunlight at the poles and they can only be images near their respective solstices.
It’s a very honest data. In March, more CO2 will be on the southern oceans and less in the north. Earth breathes CO2.
http://oco2.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/quickfacts/#
Strange that NASA says they can ‘watch’ what happens on a daily basis when: the satellite takes 16 days to get back to its starting point over the earth’s surface.
This could explain the red blob over Greenland. Was it measured there or was it measured elsewhere and the simulator ‘moved/tracked’ it there? It can only be measured once every 16 days.
The graphics look impressive but I wonder how much ‘smearing’ of data takes place due to the 16 day repeat cycle.
Iceland fuming.
100 days of gas release at Holuhraun
Gas rich but not as Laki in the 18th century
Sara Barsotti 11.12.2014
The ongoing eruption at Holuhraun, which began in at the end of August 2014, is very rich in gas. We have to go 150 years back to find an event (Trölladyngja) that had a comparable impact on Iceland and its inhabitants, in terms of environmental and health issues.
The Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) monitors gas releases from Holuhraun using DOAS and FTIR instruments for the estimation of SO2 flux and amount of other components in the volcanic cloud. The more abundant gases present are SO2, CO2, HCl, HF, H2O.
In the first month and half we had an averaged flux equal to 400 kg/s (~35 kT/d) with peaks up to 1300 kg/s (~112 kT/d). Assuming a constant release of gas until today, the eruption has injected into the atmosphere an amount of SO2 in the range 3.5 Mt (considering the average flux) – 11.2 Mt (considering the peak).
These numbers could be compared with the largest gas-rich eruption which occurred in Iceland in 1783-1784 (Laki eruption, Skaftáreldar, Móðuharðindin) and lasted 8 months. It has been estimated that during that eruption up to 122 Mt of SO2 were released into the atmosphere. Assuming a constant gas flux during the 8 months, the Laki eruption injected ~51 Mt in 100 days (5 – 15 times the Holuhraun‘s amount).
http://www.vedur.is/media/jar/myndsafn/medium/Landsat_8_20141211_swir.jpg
If all this CO2 is really coming from agricultural burning, as claimed, then it has been going on for much longer than the industrial period and would lend credence to the hypothesis that human activity had been propping up our Holocene warm spell. But assuming that burning increases directly with population, it would also dilute the contribution from energy production.
As for the termites, it would be interesting to know how much CO2 is produced by a hectare of termites in a jungle, since that drops to zero when the land is used for agriculture.
@ur momisugly markopanama: December 21, 2014 at 6:08 am
“But assuming that burning increases directly with population, it would also dilute the (CO2) contribution from energy production.”
—————-
I compiled the following statistics via reliable sources, to wit:
Increases in World Population & Atmospheric CO2 by Decade
year — world popul. – % incr. — Dec CO2 ppm – % incr. — avg increase/year
1940 – 2,300,000,000 est. ___ ____ 300 ppm
1950 – 2,556,000,053 – 11.1% ____ 310 ppm – 3.1% —— 1.0 ppm/year
1960 – 3,039,451,023 – 18.9% ____ 316 ppm – 3.2% —— 0.6 ppm/year
1970 – 3,706,618,163 – 21.9% ____ 325 ppm – 2.7% —— 0.9 ppm/year
1980 – 4,453,831,714 – 20.1% ____ 338 ppm – 3.8% —– 1.3 ppm/year
1990 – 5,278,639,789 – 18.5% ____ 354 ppm – 4.5% —– 1.6 ppm/year
2000 – 6,082,966,429 – 15.2% ____ 369 ppm – 4.3% —– 1.5 ppm/year
2010 – 6,809,972,000 – 11.9% ____ 389 ppm – 5.1% —– 2.0 ppm/year
2012 – 7,057,075,000 – 3.62% ____ 394 ppm – 1.3% —– 2.5 ppm/year
Source CO2 ppm: ftp://aftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/products/trends/co2/co2_mm_mlo.txt
There appears to be no correlation whatsoever between population increases and increases in atmospheric CO2 ppm.
I find this very surprising. According to the CAGW narrative CO2 output should be dominated at all times of year by NH power stations and transport. I did not have a problem accepting this. But this satellite data questions this – apparently natural outputs are comparable.
Hello Phlogiston,
Natural flux of atmospheric CO2 is many times greater than all human contributions. See
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/carbonDioxideSequence2002_2008_at15fps.mp4
[If the link does not work, eliminate everything outside the quotations marks – the system seems to be adding crud to the address.]
Do you see any significant human CO2 contribution in this video? I don’t – I just see nature, again. 🙂
.
As FE is trying to explain, looking at this data and claiming no fossil CO2 is like looking at the tide and claiming no SLR. –AGF
“As FE is trying to explain, looking at this data and claiming no fossil CO2 is like looking at the tide and claiming no SLR. –AGF”
To AGF:
Kindly read what I have written elsewhere (see below) and do not jump to erroneous conclusions about what I have said.
Also, the “mass balance argument” as ably debated by Ferdinand Engelbeen and Richard S Courtney is far from settled, imo.
Regards, Allan
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/15/paleo-study-past-global-warming-similar-to-todays/#comment-1816677
David Socrates asks on December 16, 2014 at 7:57 am
“Will all the folks saying that ∆CO2 follows ∆T ([temperature]. explain why in the past 15/16/17 years, ∆T = zero and ∆CO2 is 30-34 ppm?”
Already answered in my posts on this page David:
“I suggest that at a practical level, atmospheric CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales.
In the modern data record, the rate of change dCO2/dt varies ~contemporaneously with temperature and CO2 lags temperature by about 9 months.
For verification, please see my 2008 paper at
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/carbon_dioxide_in_not_the_primary_cause_of_global_warming_the_future_can_no/
CO2 also lags temperature by about 800 years in the ice core record on a longer time scale.
Therefore, CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales. CO2 does not drive temperature; temperature (among other factors) drives CO2.
….
It appears that CO2 lags T at all measured time scales. This still allows for other significant drivers of atmospheric CO2, such as fossil fuel combustion, land-use changes such as deforestation, ocean outgassing, etc.”
*************
The details of this issue have been ably argued on wattsup and other sites between Ferdinand Engelbeen and Richard S Courtney – one can search under “mass balance argument”.
The issue is one of magnitudes – how can we fully explain the current rise in atmospheric CO2 – your “∆CO2 is 30-34 ppm” – when the ∆CO2 magnitudes observed in both the modern data record and the ice core record in response to ∆T are allegedly too small to solely account for this 30-34 ppm CO2 – some parties allege that other drivers of this ∆CO2 such as fossil fuel combustion must also exist (and they may be right or wrong).
Many pages have been written and it is an interesting argument, which is of great scientific importance. However, for policy discussions I suggest all we really need to know is that global temperature T is clearly insensitive to increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and the IPCC / alarmists’ fear of catastrophic humanmade global warming is without scientific merit, and is highly counterproductive, wasteful and foolish.
As we clearly stated in our 2002 icecap.us paper cited above:
“Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.”
Furthermore, increased atmospheric CO2 from whatever cause is clearly beneficial to humanity and the environment. Earth’s atmosphere is clearly CO2 deficient and continues to decline over geological time. In fact, atmospheric CO2 at this time is too low, dangerously low for the longer term survival of carbon-based life on Earth.
More Ice Ages, which are inevitable unless geo-engineering can prevent them, will cause atmospheric CO2 concentrations on Earth to decline to the point where photosynthesis slows and ultimately ceases. This would devastate the descendants of most current life on Earth, which is carbon-based and to which, I suggest, we have a significant moral obligation.
Atmospheric and dissolved oceanic CO2 is the feedstock for all carbon-based life on Earth. More CO2 is better. Within reasonable limits, a lot more CO2 is a lot better.
As a devoted fan of carbon-based life on Earth, I feel it is my duty to advocate on our behalf. To be clear, I am not prejudiced against non-carbon-based life forms, but I really do not know any of them well enough to form an opinion. They could be very nice. 🙂
Best, Allan
Correction to above post
As we clearly stated in our 2002 APEGA paper:
“Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.”
http://www.apega.ca/members/publications/peggs/WEB11_02/kyoto_pt.htm
This is a baseline measurement. The entire first year, as the seasons change, should be considered a baseline.
It will be interesting to compare these first readings with the readings 6 months from now.
The attribution assessment as anthropogenic appears premature and to a reasonably critical person appears to be a kneejerk claim. No wonder trust in climate focused science’s ‘establishment’ sources is low and getting lower.
I await more circumspect and objective attribution assessments from longer view perspectives.
John
As FE is trying to explain, looking at this data and claiming no fossil CO2 is like looking at the tide and claiming no SLR. –AGF
Kinda looks like the U.S. and Europe have their CO2 emissions act together.
Can someone give Ed Davey a shout and point out that the CO2 over the UK is pretty well some of the lowest concentrations anywhere and he can pack up and go home now.
agricultural fires and land clearing
Those much be mighty big fires
Apparently OCO2 doesn’t “see” in the visible spectrum.
Maps of fires in October from AQUA and TERRA overlap the OCO2 map of CO2 emissions in the Southern Hemisphere. If somebunny says something is a result of burning, then you look at the fire maps first not engage in finger weaving exercises.
It’s interesting how closely the OCO-2 image tracks with MOPITT images of Carbon Monoxide (CO) from more than a decade ago. For example, here is a snapshot of CO levels during September 2002. Notice that nearly every major CO hotspot corresponds perfectly with the CO2 hotspots in the OCO-2 image 12 years later, during the same season:
http://www.atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca/people/nichitiu/MOPITT04/MopittImagUcar/mopittv3_co_200209_column.png
From September 2000:
http://www.atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca/people/nichitiu/MOPITT04/MopittImagUcar/mopittv3_co_200009_column.png
There is some variation but notice that the major centers of CO production are still in South America, Southern Africa, and Southeast Asia.
Just an observation: note how there is a circular “hole” just off the east coast of Australia, that looks unnatural. And note how there is a similar (but inversed) circular feature just off the west coast of Namibia. Could be a coincidence, could also be some weird artifact from a faulty calculation…
Notice that native people practiced burning of forests regularly:
The Impact of Fire: An Historical Perspective
http://anpsa.org.au/APOL3/sep96-1.html
UNTRAMMELED AMERICANS AND THE WILDERNESS
http://backstoryradio.org/shows/untrammeled-2/
…..but no NASA mention of “elevated Co2” above the US I see!!
……….and so if we delete the “Spring-time Bomass Burning” in Africa and S.Americas from the equation the finger points towards ?
Perfect example of why atmospheric supercomputer models fail, spectacularly. If you go to NASA, ( fedscoop.com/nasa-supercomputer-carbon-dioxide ) you will find a supercomputer model of atmospheric CO2 global dynamics circa 2006.
and see what is actually happening. Supercomputer model selection bias in action.
When I first watched the 2006 gif I was struck by the absence of C02 density in the Southern Hemisphere. Move forward to the actual measurements from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission launched in July of this year.
Can’t really tell where the CO2 is over Greenland and Iceland, but I wonder if this is from the Bardarbunga volcano (perhaps drifting west).
“As sunlight passes through Earth’s atmosphere and is reflected from Earth’s surface, molecules of atmospheric gases absorb very specific colors of light. If the light is divided into a rainbow of colors, called a spectrum, the specific colors absorbed by each gas appear as dark lines. Different gases absorb different colors, so the pattern of absorption lines provides a telltale spectral “fingerprint” for that molecule. OCO’s spectrometers were designed to detect these molecular fingerprints.”
So this device only measures the CO2 during daylight hours at any particular location, and that is determining the average concentration for that spot? That would seem to be incorrect to me!