It is my pleasure to announce that the prestigious journal Science has published a collection of five research papers based on OCO-2 data.
The main finding of this special issue was how the 2015-16 El Niño, one of the largest on record, was responsible for the record spike in carbon dioxide levels. The increase was about 3 ppm per year, while in recent years, the average annual increase has been closer to 2 ppm per year. According to Dr. Junjie Liu who led the study "about 80 percent of that amount, or 2.5 gigatons of carbon, came from natural processes occurring in tropical forests in South America, Africa and Indonesia, with each region contributing roughly the same amount."
I wasn’t part of that study, but I had a little contribution to the paper "The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 early science investigations of regional carbon dioxide fluxes" with XCO2 anomalies. Here’s a little video from Science Museum of Virginia explaining how the anomaly approach work:
You can find the OCO-2 special issue here: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6360
Janne
