Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Checking In On OCO-2, NASA's Carbon Observatory

NASA

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 recently completed its first year of operation monitoring carbon dioxide being emitted and absorbed around the planet. It's the first time scientists have been able to accurately assess global carbon levels from space.

Annmarie Eldering is deputy project scientist for OCO-2. She spoke with Dave Schlom about the new data, but started with what exactly it is.

ANNMARIE ELDERING: So OCO-2 is a satellite instrument that’s flying around the globe and we actually measure carbon dioxide by looking at how the sunlight gets reflected off the Earth's surface and is absorbed by carbon dioxide.

Two amazing facts about OCO-2 is that we can return about 100,000 scientifically useful measurements of carbon dioxide per day which is, like, a hundred times what we anyone's done before. And we can measure changes of just 1 out of the current 400 parts per million concentration — so we're very precise. A huge amount of data.

And because we can sample the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that well and that densely, we can use that to extract information about the exchange between the land, the atmosphere and the ocean.  

DAVE SCHLOM: Now recently NASA had a press conference to give an overview of how Earth is inhaling and exhaling CO² based on your observations. What were some of the major findings you released?

AE: So we talked about this first year of measurements from OCO-2 and some of the key seasonal signals that we see. And we also had some other folks talking about other NASA measurements about how much plant material there is and of the ocean’s interactions, and how we integrate all of that kind of measurement and scientific information to use our measurements, and the models to predict the carbon dioxide exchange and improve what we know scientifically about these processes.

DS: Were there any things that surprised you in the data from the first year?

AE: Yeah! The dataset has been amazing to review, and one of the things that we knew we would see was in the springtime of the Northern Hemisphere, the trees start to really become active and they pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And we knew this happened. But with OCO-2 we got this more complete spatial picture, and saw how fast it happened in time. And to me that was fascinating to see in an observational dataset.

A couple other cool things that come out is looking at places like Los Angeles: it just happens that we get a couple nice measurements across LA. We know with all the humans and the human activities and the way that the mountains trapped there in L.A., you would see CO² enhancements. And we've seen those, and we've seen the big change between the ocean the city in the desert behind us.

And the third cool thing that's happening is people have been studying the data over the Pacific. We know we have an El Niño going, the ocean temperatures are a bit warmer, you have warmer sea surface temperatures. We certainly expect an impact on carbon dioxide, but nobody's ever really observed this before. So the scientists are now trying to extract what that signal is from the data, and really quantify how much sea surface temperature warming can impact the atmospheric CO².

DS: That's Annmarie Eldering, deputy project scientists for NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 satellite. The report is a production of North State Public Radio. Follow us on Twitter: @nsprnews and @daveschlom. 

Dave Schlom is the longtime host and creator of Blue Dot. From surfing to Voyager in interstellar space, rock guitar to orcas in our imperiled oceans, the topics on Blue Dot are as varied as the host’s interests and connections -- which are pretty limitless! An internationally respected space history journalist, Dave is also deeply fascinated by all aspects of the grand workings of nature’s awesome machinery on scales ranging from galactic to subatomic. And topics take in all aspects of the arts and sciences.