Tansat's First Attempt to Detect Human-Caused CO2 is Successful
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
An international research team has analyzed measurements from the TanSat mission and the Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor mission to identify carbon dioxide from human activities. This is the first attempt to use TanSat measurements to detect anthropogenic, or human-caused, carbon dioxide emission signatures. Quantifying anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is one of the most important requirements needed for greenhouse gases to be monitored on a global basis.
[...] TanSat, launched in 2016, is China's first global carbon dioxide monitoring satellite (Tan is the Chinese pronunciation of carbon). While TanSat has been providing researchers with data for several years, new algorithms were recently added to the TanSat instruments that greatly improved TanSat's measurement precision.
The team conducted their study looking at two sets of measurements collected over two cities. The team used TanSat carbon dioxide data captured in May 2018 near Tangshan, China, and in March 2018 near Tokyo, Japan. They compared the TanSat data to nitrogen dioxide measurements captured by the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument onboard the Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite on the same dates over the same cities.
[...] Their two case studies show TanSat carbon dioxide measurements have the capability to capture the anthropogenic variations in the plume and have spatial patterns like that of the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument's nitrogen dioxide observations. In addition, the carbon dioxide-to-nitrogen dioxide ratio in Tangshan, China, and Tokyo, Japan, align with the emission inventories.
[...] "Our goal is to use satellite measurements to improve our knowledge on carbon cycle and to further analyze and constraint the carbon dioxide sources and sinks and their uncertainties," said Liu.
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