Until recently, efforts to measure and model climate change contained a greater degree of uncertainty than scientists would prefer. This was due to the limitations of ground-based monitoring stations and satellites that collect data about carbon dioxide.
But that's changing due to NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite, which is designed to provide a more precise and complete view of how carbon dioxide moves through the atmosphere, as well as between the atmosphere and plants, soil and the oceans.
"Carbon can't hide anymore," NASA climate scientist Lesley Ott explained in a telephone interview.
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The satellite measures the number of molecules of CO2 and air between the surface and outer space by analyzing wavelengths of light that CO2 absorbs. It takes 24 readings each second and provides measurements that are accurate to 0.25 percent. It's also capable of providing information about regions where there's poor coverage by ground-based sampling.
Those capabilities allow climate researchers "to see the kind of gradients that we need for good science," Ott said.
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The $465 million satellite, launched in 2014, has now amassed more than a year's worth of data, and it's helping scientists to see both the sources of carbon dioxide emissions and also the sinks -- that is, places where carbon is stored. OCO-2's information could help them to fill in some gaps in their knowledge, and to get a clearer idea of much the Earth's climate will change in the future.
"We already know that plants and the ocean absorb half of human carbon emissions, which is doing us a big favor," Ott said. "But we haven't understood where that CO2 is being sequestered, and what are the processes that do it."
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