Guest essay by Ric Werme
It’s been a long wait, but OCO-2 speaks!
Let’s start with a timeline:
- Feb 2009: NASA’s $273 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite crashed into the ocean near Antarctica shortly after launch today from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Bummer.
- Jul 2014: Try 2 was successful. The instruments checked out, we all look forward to results.
- Nov
21042014: NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center releases an animation of a model of CO2 flow across the Earth. Visually, it’s very attractive and feels right, but it doesn’t look at all like the OCO-2 imagery. It may be the scaling, it may be OCO-2’s poor temporal resolution, it may be partly including a carbon monoxide display. I’m sure the modelers will have lots to do for the next few years! - Dec 2014: Well, it took a while, but the first image from OCO-2 is release and it’s really not what we expected. There’s a lot of CO2 over China, and a lot that appears related to slash and burn agriculture, but Europe and the US look pretty good.
- July 2015: The New Horizons mission finally reaches Pluto. This team did things right. They posted images as soon as they had them. We could watch it get closer to Pluto, we could see Pluto up close right after the flyby, and they’re still releasing images as fast as the slow, weak downlink delivers them.
- Aug 2015: I get tired of waiting on OCO-2 and send Email to the OCO-2 PR contact asking what’s up. A month later I get a reply that includes:
Over the next couple of months, we will be releasing a number of new OCO-2 visual products to the public. Stay tuned! And thanks for your interest in the mission.
- Oct 2015: I’m not the only impatient person at WUWT, I see. However, Erik Swenson did something about and produced his own imagery. He did a great job.
- Oct 2015: The OCO-2 team releases a YouTube video showing the same sort of images that Erik released. I haven’t compared them yet, I wanted to get this up quick.
Check out first full year of OCO-2 science operations.
The video is interesting, but is missing mid-April to mid-May. I’m impressed at how quickly plants pull down CO2 in the northern spring, though I noticed that before I noticed the missing month. I’m impressed at how much CO2 is released in the tropics. I’m intrigued that there seems to be a bit of a surge in CO2 before spring triggers plant growth. Perhaps thawing ground releases CO2 produced by tree roots and rotting vegetation during the winter.
[Update – on the sampled area.]
A number of early comments refer to how much surface area doesn’t have imagery. I suggest reviewing Erik Swenson’s post and comments, a lot of that dialog applies here.
There’s also a link to NASA’s Data Product User’s Guide which goes into a lot of detail.
First, the CO2 measurements are done with a spectroscope. Light from the Earth’s surface enters a telescope, a small sample is selected from a slit. That line of light is bounced off a diffraction grating onto an imaging chip that provides 1016 pixels of the spectrum. There are three spectrometers tuned to areas of interest for O2 (I assume this is used to measure intensity), and two bands of CO2’s spectra.
Light has to go from the surface of the Earth to the satellite, and to measure the tiny differences due to changes of CO2 concentration, they want a bright source on the ground. They measure from two different paths (on different orbits). First is the “nadir” reading where the satellite looks straight down. This is not very bright, but it has the best spatial resolution. The other direction is to look at sunlight’s glint reflecting off water. This is much brighter, so it’s easier to measure the brightness of the spectral lines.
The measurements require that from the point being observed, the sun has to be at lest 5° above the horizon in nadir mode and 15° above in glint mode. Clouds, terrain, etc. can make for poor or unusable data. Still, it appears to me that NASA isn’t imaging as much data as Erik did.
Keep in mind that OCO-2 is one of the first satellites doing this sort of work. Astronomical spectral analysis generally doesn’t do the resolution that OCO-2 needs and has the opportunity to take very long exposures. So while climate scientists are looking forward to the data, the designers will be looking at things to do for the next design.
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This release, at last, shows up a couple of weeks before COP21 starts.
How many ‘noble cause’ thumbs have there been on the scales?
Just askin’!!
Sorry that this is off-topic – but – what a massive surprise. I have just discovered that the Guardian newspaper managed to pass off the very newsworthy and certainly interesting ICEsat study showing that Antarctica has gained mass – by hiding the revelation 2/3rds of the way into an article where the alarmist Glaciologist Rignot and PIK make some daft observations about how bits of ice on the edge keep falling off into the sea.
And then they asked Michael Mann to rubbish the Zwally results for them.
How totally moronic – a cursory lesson in how to conceal critical facts and bamboozle your readership with completely unsubstantiated nonsense: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/02/melting-ice-in-west-antarctica-could-raise-seas-by-3m-warns-study
It’s the Grauniad – what do you expect?
I remember reading a front page article years ago about the dreadful effect on local sealife (think The Simpsons titles!) of pollution from the coastal nuclear power stations in NW England. It was only in the last half-inch of a four column report that they got to the facts, which were that a survey had been commissioned to collect evidence of such effects, rather than that such evidence had been found.
But the Grauniad routinely panders to its regular readers’ prejudices, and the only surprise is the rare occasion when it doesn’t. OK, that’s true of most MSM, but it is the paper of choice for Beeboids and Blobistas in public service, and when they take in the headline without reading to the end the effects on the rest of us can be disastrous.
PS – I don’t recall seeing the results of the sealife survey. Perhaps its findings didn’t confirm their prejudices.
And to think that I used to read the Grauniad and believe every word that it told me.
Then occasionally, I’d read a book associated with the BBC and Grauniad agenda.
Which would provide me with apparent confirmation.
Hence, I truly understand what it is like to be utterly brainwashed!! 🙂
We all start out in life reading about the mistakes of the past, and internalizing the idea that, since those mistakes are now recognized, we aren’t making new ones. We have a children’s trust in our parents and, by extension, other adults. When others suggest our view of a benign world of rational adults is at odds with reality, our first reaction is denial. Eventually, a goodly portion of us move on through the other stages of grief due to our loss of innocence. Others stay trapped in a childlike fantasy world.
Thence the saying, if you’re not a Socialist when you are 18, you’re heartless. If you’re not a Conservative by 40, you’re brainless.
Ric Werme,
‘I’m sure the modelers
will have lots to do for the
next few years!’
is it modelling, on real instrumental data – not mere interpreting and vizualization.
Thx – Hans
supposedly this is raw data from the orbiting sat… how “raw” said data truly is is up for debate.
JPL and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center personnel are under tremendous attack and pressure to deliver the “goods” that Obama and Bon Ki Moon DEMAND and in desperation need!
COP21 Paris will be Obama’s Swan Song and the anointment of “little man” Bon Ki Moon, born of Japanese Colonials in Korea during Japan’s Colonial Empire building, will announce that “Global Warming” and “Climate Change” are manufactured by the dreaded Caucasian Thieves of the United States of America. HaRump HaRump.
In France outside at Versailles, the same RailRoad Car where Adolf Hitler welcomed the conquered French “Ambassadors” to the “New” Germany of 22 June 1940, the “little man” Bon Ki Moon will fulfill destiny and sign a declaration establishing Death Factories in the United States of America for the killing of Caucasian USA citizens, while Obama smiles a big grin and nods his head frantically in frenzy support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_of_22_June_1940
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_under_Japanese_rule
COP21 Paris is a weighty burden in the “minds”.
Ha ha
Clearly this is going to require more grant money….
Its Biblical data.
Depends how you use it.
Why do we not see artifacts from the jet streams and the atmospheric gyres (polar vortices to alarmists)?
Each scan of the Earth takes 16 days (233 orbits), plenty of time to smear out weather systems.
Like averaging temperature for a whole planet? I am not convinced at all. Sure, we can smear “dog doo” so thinly that you cannot taste or smell it, but it is still there.
And how do you know this Patrick?
Got a reference?
🙂
Never mind, I do not wish to know.
Eaten takeout recently?
You’d think that the noise from sunlight reflected off water would overwhelm the signal you’re trying to find.
No – they’re looking at Infrared absorption lines – light goes through CO2, some wavelengths get absorbed. The light gets spread out into a spectrum, and the brightness difference between different wavelengths is easier to discern when you have a bright source. If the source isn’t as bright, you might have to increase the slit width, but that decreases resolution and contrast of the spectra.
The only serious noise in sunlight are the Fraunhofer absorption lines, but those are from monoatomic sources and block visible wavelengths.
Ric Werme commented regarding higher CO2 concentrations over the Arabian Peninsula:
“Flaring off natural gas from the oil wells is a possibility I don’t know how much there is, probably a lot.”
Not so. Very little of the solution gas in the oilfields is flared. The Saudi’s have a concentrated effort to capture as much rich solution gas as possible. There are large point sources of CO2 generation along the east and west coasts for refineries, desalination, and petrochemical industries, but this does not seem to be represented by the imagery.
Nigeria + West Africa in general?
How does water vapour (Clouds) affect the readings of CO2? I would accept visual like that if it were “measured” on a cloudless earth. Not going to happen.
Yes! And I read the tech’s on it in the post.
Based on the first data, I somehow doubt that the rest of the data is accurate. Sorry, but that’s how government adjustments go…
The New Horizons mission finally reaches Pluto. This team did things right. They posted images as soon as they had them.
A-Train launched from Pluto more likely to be on time?
volcano activity equals C02?
“Keep in mind that OCO-2 is one of the first satellites doing this sort of work. Astronomical spectral analysis generally doesn’t do the resolution that OCO-2 needs and has the opportunity to take very long exposures. So while climate scientists are looking forward to the data, the designers will be looking at things to do for the next design”
////
So, so far generally a waste of money. What is new in Climate Science.
Let’s hope that this cAGW scam falls apart before they waste the money on the redesign, as I would sooner that NASA put that money towards visiting one of the moons of Saturn or Jupiter looking for life/micro organisms existing in extreme environments.
“Keep in mind that OCO-2 is one of the first satellites doing this sort of work. Astronomical spectral analysis generally doesn’t do the resolution that OCO-2 needs and has the opportunity to take very long exposures. So while climate scientists are looking forward to the data, the designers will be looking at things to do for the next design”
////
So, so far generally a waste of money. What is new in Climate Science.
Let’s hope that this cAGW scam falls apart before they waste the money on the redesign, as I would sooner that NASA put that money to visiting one of the moons of Saturn or Jupiter looking for life/micro organisms existing in extreme environments.
No images of solar induced chlorophyll fluorescence this time?
That image appears to have been adjusted. The first image I saw a while back looked nothing like this one. What have they changed
So now you are telling us that CO2 actually MIXES in the air ! And here are our brilliant UK politicians spending £6 billion a year to reduce the CO2 over the UK. Only 1.3% of world emissions. Only 20% of that to generate electricity. Only between 1 and 12% reduction of that 20% on a good day for £6 billion. Then we don’t get to keep other peoples CO2 out? Should we tell Cameron? Perhaps the renewable energy junkies could build an anti CO2 fence for another £6 billion so that our grandchildren can continue to live in a cold miserable climate whilst the rest of the world is 2 degrees warmer.
(Do I need to write /sarc)
No, but it would be good to tell the government, although, of course, it will not listen.
Wow, mainstream just discovered oceanic outgassing.
Just maybe mainstream science just discovered how to measure it properly at or just above the surface. Not the upwelling kind.
Someone is bound to claim that the localised concentration of co2 in the atmosphere is what causes the ocean to heat up and create an El Nino.
The season of good loveliness is nearly here.
Possibly, if you’re in any way serious about this Carbon Oxide stuff, suggest to your nearest and dearest they get for you a carbon oxide tester. For Christmas innit. And the Weather Shop, is there *really* not a CO2 meter in there?
(I had to buy my own (~£75 off ebay as my dearest is quite convinced I’m totally nuts and she, as a mental health professional, should know)
Get one that will connect to a computer. For obvious reasons, unless you are a bona fide corpse, skeleton even.
Then explain these sorts of things:
On a warm wind-less early morning (late summer/early fall) it will read 500+ and when the sun comes up will drop and by evening is down to less than 400.
Again, at a warm time of year, put it on a grassy lawn with a black bucket over it and it will rise by 80 or 90 within 5 minutes. Repeat during winter and it won’t hardly move
Make a large bucket with a clear window, out that over the tester on a warm day and..
…..at noon if its sunny, it will drop by 100 inside 5 minutes
…..plus/minus 4 hours from solar noon it will stay the same
….at night it will rise by 100 inside 5 minutes
Maybe I’m lucky in that my 2 nearest power stations (at 50 miles each) were both nukes and now closed, the largest city is pop:100k and over 12 miles away
In any case, you’ll *very* quickly learn that carbon oxide is THE most nebulous, ghostly and enigmatic stuff you ever could wish to meet. Where your sanity will be severely tested is how to reconcile these peeps graph with a 15ppm x-axis when you can plot a graph with and x-axis range of 280 to 520.
Maybe you’ll realise that plants control the carbon dioxide, they also (especially when long dead and buried) control the water which in turn controls The Climate.
Although Prof Salby doesn’t seem to pin down an actual cause for the temperature dependence of CO2 he talks about, your little carbon tester will tell you.
How many times do we hear on here that industrial CO2 id but a tiny fraction of the total carbon cycle?
No cycle, its the biggest beast of a bastid muvver f**ker roller coaster you ever met and its got minute-by-minute, hourly daily, and seasonal twists and turns.
Ultimately, modern farmers are controlling the plants – that is where the CO2 is coming from…
CO2 is not a well mixed gas at low altitudes. At low altitudes the sources and sinks dominate the picture and as you suggest there is a huge range in variability.
This data causes problems for Paris (or ought to do so) since the scheme being mooted is that carbon polluters should pay carbon reparation. One of the issues that therefore arises is which countries are carbon polluters and which are not.
One point to note is that Australia appears to be a net carbon sink virtually year round. How are they going to persuade Australia that it should commit to paying carbon reparation when far from emitting CO2 it is a sink. In fact, Australia ought to be claiming that it is entitled to receive reparation.
Perhaps that is why Abbott was got rid of. Perhaps had he been directing negotiations Australia would of turned tables upside down.
I consider that all Australian viewers should write to their government pointing out the latest OCO-2 data and explaining to the government that this shows Australia to not be a carbon polluter but a carbon sink and seek confirmation that Australia will not be committing to pay carbon reparations but instead seeking to be paid reparations.
Ric Werme:
Thankyou for posting the animation. However, the annual plot of OCO-2 data provided by Erik Swenson is more informative than the animation.
At issue is what the OCO-2 data indicates about the cause of the rise of atmospheric CO2 concentration over the year of the animation.
It is claimed by some (i.e. IPCC, Enbelbeen, etc.) that the cause of the rise is emissions of CO2 from human industrial activity (i.e. anthropogenic CO2) overloading the natural mechanisms which sequester CO2. That claim cannot be correct if all the anthropogenic CO2 is sequestered local to its emission sources.
If the maximum atmospheric CO2 concentrations are over areas of human industrial activity then it is reasonable to infer that the anthropogenic CO2 is overloading the natural mechanisms which sequester CO2 to cause the rise in atmospheric CO2.
But
If the maximum atmospheric CO2 concentrations are NOT over areas of human industrial activity then it is reasonable to infer that the anthropogenic CO2 is NOT overloading the natural mechanisms which sequester CO2 to cause the rise in atmospheric CO2.
Hence, the most important information is the spatial distribution of maximum CO2 concentration. The values of CO2 concentration are of relatively little importance (they are the curtain): much more important is where the regions of maximum CO2 concentration occur (they are Oz behind the curtain).
The annual plot from Erik Swenson does NOT show the areas of maximum CO2 concentration are mostly coincident with regions of human industrial activity. This suggests the human industrial activity did NOT overload the natural mechanisms which sequester CO2 to cause the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration over the year.
The variable screening of areas in the animation is unfortunate and I fail to think of any technical reason for it. However, the screening prevents observation of CO2 concentrations over the major industrial areas throughout the year and, therefore, it prevents confirmation or refutation of the indication of the annual plot from Erik Swenson.
Richard
Part agree, at least. I’ve a considerable regard for Ferdinand Engelbeen but I really feel there is something deeply wrong with this ‘mass balance’ argument. Any biologist ought to have a visceral objection to the idea that simple addition and subtraction can come up with an answer wherever living systems are involved. Anybody know what the errors of estimation might be on any of the ‘mass balance’ figures? Huge, I’d guess. Certainly huge in relation to the small overall changes in CO2 which we actually observe at Mauna Loa and elsewhere. And the relatively large local and seasonal fluctuations that we see, which represent local and temporal dynamic responses, may be able to tell us just how misleading this approach might be. With enough data from OCO-2 we can hope to tease out some answers, at last, though I fully accept that we can’t expect to actually see the answer by watching the animation. I expect we’ll still be talking about this in a couple of year’s time.
The “mass balance” argument, which I insist on calling the pseudo-mass balance argument, is wrong because nature also reacts to the anthropogenic input, and some of its sink activity is an expanded response due to that.
That is, the pseudo-mass balance argument goes like this:
C = N + A – S
C = measured delta concentration
N = natural inputs
A = anthropogenic inputs
S = natural sinks
Since C is approximately 1/2 of A, N – S is negative, and nature is a net sink, hence nature cannot be responsible for the rise. So, it is claimed. But, that is wrong.
Just because N-S is negative does not mean that nature is not contributing more than it is taking out, because this is a dynamic balance. If N-S is less negative than it would be if nature were not in surplus, then nature is the driving force.
Put another way, because this is a dynamic system, S is composed of two parts, a portion which is a response to natural forcing SN, and a portion which is a response to anthropogenic forcing SA, such that S = SN + SA. SA exists only because of, and as a response to, A. If you took A away, SA also would diminish to zero. With active sinks, SA can be as large as A itself.
So, we have
C = N + A – (SN + SA)
or
C – A + SA = N – SN
C is approximately 1/2 A, so we have
SA – 0.5*A = N – SN
SA can be anything between 0 and A (weak sinks versus strong sinks), and thus
-0.5*A < N – SN < 0.5*A
Thus, with active sinks, N – SN can be as high as 0.5*A, and nature would be a net source.
The pseudo-mass balance argument is very naive and simplistic. You should not give any credence to anyone who espouses it, and should rightly question their qualifications to reason out anything about complex systems.
(Sockpuppet’s comment deleted. -mod)
You are correct on that one point. I should have written “Just because N-S is negative does not mean that nature on its own is not contributing more than it is taking out”. Take away the portion of natural sink activity which is induced by artificial forcing, and N – S can become positive. Indeed, does become positive, because temperatures are the driving force behind atmospheric CO2. See Salby, Humlum, et al.
I did address address the fact that N-S is currently negative. See:
This is really a very basic problem in dynamic analysis. People who fall for the pseudo-mass balance argument are self-identifying as dunces whose opinion should be given little weight.
(Sockpuppet’s comment deleted. -mod)
Remains negative, but less in absolute value.
If N – SN is positive, but N – (SN+SA) is negative, then N – (SN+SA) is less negative (closer to zero) than it would be if N – SN were negative.
(Sockpuppet’s comment deleted. -mod)
But, it is only because of the artificially induced sink activity, which goes away when there is no artificial source. For all intents and purposes, those are artificial sinks. They have to be counted on the artificial side of the ledger.
(Sockpuppet’s comment deleted. -mod)
That fact alone does not establish attribution. Again, if N-S is less negative than it would be if nature on its own were not in surplus, then nature is the driving force.
(You’ve been arguing with the ‘Socrates’ sockpuppet. His comments have been deleted. Your responses remain. -mod.)
Thank you. No doubt, he would have gone on interminably, refusing to understand.
For others, though, this is an important point to carry forward. Just because N-S is negative, that does not mean that the observed rise is not from natural sources. The sink reaction to artificial inputs must be accounted for on the artificial side of the ledger.
The fact of which should stop the climate warming bandwagon in its tracks. But it won’t alas.
Ferdinand Engelbeen November 4, 2015 at 11:25 pm
“It’s not because a lot of people from the “warmist” side dismiss his findings that this means that he is right… He made several mistakes which render his opinion quite wrong…”
Ferdinand – what mistakes did Dr Salby make?
Peter,
In short:
– Attributing all increase in dCO2/dt, not only the variability to the temperature increase, while temperature is only good for some 10 ppmv of the 110 ppmv increase and humans emitted over 200 ppmv in the same time span.
– Alluding to a theoretical migration of CO2 in ice cores to “prove” the former, but if real, that would imply an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere which doubles each time interglacial period back in time (to compensate for the diffusion while measured values remain about the same over the interglacials) and that implies that the values during glacial times (90% of the time) were much lower, even negative…
In his last speech in London this year, he didn’t repeat that claim…
I was at the Parliament in London for his speech of 2014 with Lord Monckton and asked some pertinent questions, which were not really answered. Unfortunately there was little time for debate…
These are not “mistakes”. They are Ferdinand’s opinions.
– essentially all of the increase in atmospheric CO2 is temperature related. Human inputs do have very little effect.
– The ice cores, along with anthropogenic attribution, demand a very high bandwidth control of CO2 up until the modern era, and a low bandwidth control sensitive to our inputs afterward. You cannot simultaneously have both high bandwidth and low bandwidth response. There is thus a fundamental disconnect between the ice core estimates and the attribution of rising CO2 to puny human inputs.
A nice informative post Ric, thank you