The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 early science investigations of regional carbon dioxide fluxes

• Published in: Science
• Main Authors: Eldering, A., Wennberg, P. O., Crisp, D., Schimel, D. S., Gunson, M. R., Chatterjee, A., Liu, J., Schwander, F. M., Sun, Y., O'Dell, C. W., Frankenberg, C., Taylor, T., Fisher, B., Osterman, G. B., Wunch, D., Hakkarainen, J., Tamminen, J., Weir, B.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Association for the Advancement of Science 2017
• Subjects: Subarctic
• Online Access: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/PMC5668686; https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aam5745

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) mission was motivated by the need to diagnose how the increasing concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO_2) is altering the productivity of the biosphere and the uptake of CO_2 by the oceans. Launched on 2 July 2014, OCO-2 provides retrievals of the column-averaged CO_2 dry-air mole fraction (XCO_2) as well as the fluorescence from chlorophyll in terrestrial plants. The seasonal pattern of uptake by the terrestrial biosphere is recorded in fluorescence and the drawdown of XCO_2 during summer. Launched just before one of the most intense El Niños of the past century, OCO-2 measurements of XCO_2 and fluorescence record the impact of the large change in ocean temperature and rainfall on uptake and release of CO_2 by the oceans and biosphere. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received 11 December 2016; accepted 12 July 2017. Retrieved Level 2 OCO-2 XCO_2 (version v7Br) data used in this study are archived in a permanent repository at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center's Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES-DISC) and are also available at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (http://co2.jpl.nasa.gov). Part of the research described in this paper was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The movie was created by B. Weir, L. Ott, S. Pawson, H. Mitchell, and G. Shirah at Goddard Space Flight Center and the Scientific Visualization Studio. B.W., L.O., and S.P. were supported by the NASA Carbon Monitoring System and the OCO-2 Science Team NASA Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) projects. K. Yuen assisted with figure production. J.H. and J.T. were supported by the Academy of Finland Inversion Algorithms and Quantification of Uncertainties in Atmospheric Remote Sensing (INQUIRE) (grant number 267442) and Carbon Balance under Changing Processes if Arctic and Subarctic Cryosphere (CARB-ARC) ...