The Audacity of Hope: President Obama Explains How Pollution Affects Our Planet

Hello,

have you guys seen this already!? In this video President Obama speaks about OMI data. And if you didn't know, OMI  is a Dutch-Finnish satellite instrument  onboard NASA's Aura spacecraft etc.



Btw. See you next week in EGU! Maybe I will do some live posting from there...

Janne

Using OCO-2 Data to Analyze Anthropogenic CO2 Hotspots: First Preliminary Results

Hello,

just submitted the abstract below to the "12th International Workshop on Greenhouse Gas Measurements from Space." I am not going, but our boss Johanna Tamminen will present this.

Janne

Using OCO-2 Data to Analyze Anthropogenic CO₂ Hotspots:

First Preliminary Results

Janne Hakkarainen (1), Iolanda Ialongo (1), and Johanna Tamminen (1)

(1) Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI)

NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) was launched on 2 July 2014 to monitor global atmospheric concentration and flux of CO₂ from space. As of March 2016, the instrument has collected more than one year of data. In this paper, we utilize this data record to analyze hotspots of anthropogenic CO₂ sources. Our aim is to utilize advanced techniques developed to analyze spaceborne nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) and sulfur dioxide (SO₂)—both short-lived atmospheric trace gases with both anthropogenic and natural sources—datasets. Unfortunately, trends, seasonality, long lifetime, and large atmospheric background significantly complicate the analysis of CO₂ hotspots. Our methodology is based on simultaneously deseasonalizing and detrending the data, and then mapping the remaining—the so-called anomaly data—to a grid.  

In this paper, we show that the main anthropogenic pollution regions like eastern USA, Central Europe, East Asia, and Middle East are easily detectable from our OCO-2 CO₂ anomaly maps. In addition, also smaller sources are visible. In order to better understand CO₂ anomaly maps, we simultaneously analyze the established NO₂ and SO₂ maps—observed by Dutch-Finnish Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) onboard NASA’s Aura spacecraft—and use these data records also to qualitatively validate our results. In future, as the OCO-2 data record gets longer, we hope to individually detect all the Megacities.

Keywords: OCO-2, carbon dioxide, anthropogenic emissions, hotspots, validation, OMI, nitrogen dioxide