Originally published on January 13th, 2009

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh are to participate in a project aiming to curb global warming by means of satellites measuring carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Known as the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) and the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT), the instruments are to be launched by NASA and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency over the course of the next two months.

The repeated global coverage enabled by OCO and GOSAT will for the first time provide regional accounts of carbon emissions and absorption, including for remote regions such as the Amazon basin and African forests, which have long been of key interest and accounted for large gaps in scientific understanding of the carbon cycle.

Such data could potentially be of immense importance in tackling climate change, not least in that identification of environmental conditions which encourage the absorption of carbon dioxide, such as forests or oceans, also known as carbon sinks, could help to reduce emissions by preservation or recreation of such conditions naturally or artificially.

Speaking to Student, Paul Palmer, Lecturer in Remote Sensing & Modelling at the School of GeoSciences, said: “Certainly for the land based sinks, we do not know where they all are and how they will respond to changes in climate.

“To put it into context, we cannot account for an annual sink of carbon equivalent to six times the weight of the human population.”
“Because the overlying atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is so large and uniform, it is a genuine engineering feat to be able to measure carbon dioxide from space to a precision necessary to observe the small changes due to surface sources and sinks.”

Given that the new data produced by these satellites will also help to identify regions responsible for the highest levels of carbon emission and to quantify the outputs of individual countries, it is hoped that in the longer term the project will enable development of a better accounting system for international carbon trading.