NASA/JPL/GSFC
NASA’s 2015 simulation of if all the carbon dioxide had never been absorbed.
Nationalgeographic.co.id—Do friends feel the temperature is getting hotter from year to year? Global average temperatures are projected to increase between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius by 2030, according to Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) IPCC the year 2021. If you feel the temperature increasing around you, chances are the IPCC predicted warming is very real.
The increase, according to the report, is due to “excess carbon dioxide” in Earth’s atmosphere. The impacts will significantly affect ecological systems, including species extinction, forest fires, extreme weather, and crop failures.
The previous detection of carbon dioxide concentrations was reported in 2013 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with up to 400 ppm (parts per million). This is the first time this number has touched large numbers since the Pliocene Era, between 5 and 1 million years ago.
Recently mapping related distribution of abundance, monitored by NASA satellites in release on January 9, 2023. This observation was revealed through NASA’s twin Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) 2 and 3 satellite missions which have been operating since 2014 and 2019. Both of them can help and better understand the characteristics of climate change.
The researchers used data from OCO-2 and OCO-3. They monitor a coal-fired power plant in Poland, namely the Belchatów Power Plant which has been in operation since 1988. This power plant is one of the largest lignite-using power plants in the world with a capacity of 5,102 megawatts.
It is from there that the researchers detect and track changes in carbon dioxide and quantify the resulting emissions. The results of their findings, they published in Frontiers in Remote Sensing in October 2022, entitled “Tracking CO2 emission reductions from space: A case study at Europe’s largest fossil fuel power plant“
“As a community, we are refining tools and techniques to be able to extract more information from data than we originally planned. We learned that we actually can understand much more about anthropogenic emissions than we previously thought,” said Abhishek Chatterjee, OCO-3 mission project scientist and one of the researchers.
“It’s very exciting to think that we’re going to get another five to six years of operation with OCO-3. We see that taking measurements at the right time and at the right scale is very important,” he continues.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s OCO-3 is installed on the underside of the International Space Station. The instrument, launched in 2019, was not originally designed to detect carbon dioxide emissions from individual facilities, but scientists say it will be used for further source studies in the future.
The paper’s lead author is Ray Nassar. He is a senior researcher at Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). He emphasized that most carbon dioxide emission reports are made from estimates or data collected at ground level.
The way this works, researchers take into account the mass of fossil fuels used, calculate the expected emissions, and usually do not involve measuring the atmosphere. “Finer details about exactly when and where emissions occurred are often not available,” he said.
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