Space-based measurements of carbon dioxide
used to help answer questions about Earth's carbon cycle
Space-based measurements of carbon dioxide (CO2) are used to help answer questions about Earth's carbon cycle. There are a variety of active and planned instruments for measuring carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere from space. The first satellite mission designed to measure CO2 was the Interferometric Monitor for Greenhouse Gases (IMG) on board the ADEOS I satellite in 1996. This mission lasted less than a year. Since then, additional space-based measurements have begun, including those from two high-precision (better than 0.3% or 1 ppm) satellites (GOSAT and OCO-2). Different instrument designs may reflect different primary missions.
Purposes and highlights of findings
There are outstanding questions in carbon cycle science that satellite observations can help answer. The Earth system absorbs about half of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, it is unclear exactly how this uptake is partitioned to different regions across the globe. It is also uncertain how different regions will behave in terms of CO2 flux under a different climate.
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This entry incorporates text from “Space-based measurements of carbon dioxide” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.