First Maps from Carbon-Monitoring Satellite Show Global CO2 Levels

[n2doc]

December 19, 2014 |By Richard Monastersky and Nature magazine


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OCO-2 aims to measure atmospheric CO2 levels with enough precision to help pin down how human activities and natural systems are emitting and absorbing the greenhouse gas.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech


NASA’s carbon-monitoring satellite has passed its post-launch checks and is beaming high-quality data back to Earth. But getting to this point required some last-minute adjustments: after the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) launched in July, the agency had to overcome a key design problem with the spacecraft that had gone unnoticed in a decade of planning.

News of the satellite’s status came on December 18 briefing at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, California, where OCO-2 scientists released the first images from the probe. “The results and the promise of this mission are quite amazing,” said Annmarie Eldering, deputy project scientist for OCO-2 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The data from OCO-2—which maps the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as it circles the globe—is a long time coming. Scientists and engineers on the project have ridden an emotional roller coaster: in 2009, a rocket failure doomed the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, their first attempt at a carbon-mapping probe.

more
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-maps-from-carbon-monitoring-satellite-show-global-co2-levels/

[Turbineguy]

1. Strangely enough the greatest

concentrations are over the most forested regions of the planet. The article suggests that this is due to burning. But I have to wonder if this is not some sort of iteration of "nature abhors a vacuum".