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Activity reductions in early 2020 due to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic led to unprecedented decreases in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Despite their record size, the resulting atmospheric signals are smaller than and obscured by climate variability in atmospheric transport and biospheric fluxes, notably that related to the 2019–2020 Indian Ocean Dipole. Monitoring CO2 anomalies and distinguishing human and climatic causes thus remain a new frontier in Earth system science. We show that the impact of short-term regional changes in fossil fuel emissions on CO2 concentrations was observable from space. Starting in February and continuing through May, column CO2 over many of the world’s largest emitting regions was 0.14 to 0.62 parts per million less than expected in a pandemic-free scenario, consistent with reductions of 3 to 13% in annual global emissions. Current spaceborne technologies are therefore approaching levels of accuracy and precision needed to support climate mitigation strategies with future missions expected to meet those needs.

We use a global transport model and satellite retrievals of the carbon dioxide (CO2) column average to explore the impact of CO2 emissions reductions that occurred during the economic downturn at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The changes in the column averages are substantial in a few places of the model global grid, but the induced gradients are most often less than the random errors of the retrievals. The current necessity to restrict the quality-assured column retrievals to almost cloud-free areas appears to be a major obstacle in identifying changes in CO2 emissions. Indeed, large changes have occurred in the presence of clouds, and in places that were cloud free in 2020, the comparison with previous years is hampered by different cloud conditions during these years. We therefore recommend to favor all-weather CO2 monitoring systems, at least in situ, to support international efforts to reduce emissions.

Satellite-based observations of carbon dioxide (CO2) are sensitive to all processes that affect the propagation of radiation in the atmosphere, including scattering and absorption by atmospheric aerosols. Therefore, accurate retrievals of column-averaged CO2 (XCO2) benefit from detailed information on the aerosol conditions. This is particularly relevant for future missions focusing on observing anthropogenic CO2 emissions, such as the Copernicus Anthropogenic CO2 Monitoring mission (CO2M). To fully prepare for CO2M observations, it is informative to investigate existing observations in addition to other approaches. Our focus here is on observations from the NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory -2 (OCO-2) mission. In the operational full-physics XCO2 retrieval used to generate OCO-2 level 2 products, the aerosol properties are known to have high uncertainty but their main objective is to facilitate CO2 retrievals. We evaluate the OCO-2 product from the point of view of aerosols by comparing the OCO-2 retrieved aerosol properties to collocated Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS) Aqua Dark Target aerosol products. We find that there is a systematic difference between the aerosol optical depth (AOD, τ) values retrieved by the two instruments, such that τOCO−2 ∼ 0.4τMODIS. We also find a dependence of the XCO2 on the AOD difference, indicating an aerosol-induced effect in the XCO2 retrieval. In addition, we find a weak but statistically significant correlation between MODIS AOD and XCO2, which can be partly explained by natural covariance and co-emission of aerosols and CO2 but is partly masked by the aerosol-induced XCO2 bias. Furthermore, we find that issues in the OCO-2 aerosol retrieval may lead to misclassification of the quality flag for a small fraction of OCO-2 retrievals. Based on MODIS data, 4.1 % of low AOD cases are incorrectly classified as high AOD (low quality) pixels, while 16.5 % of high AOD cases are erroneously classified as low AOD (high quality) pixels. Finally, we investigate the effect of an AOD threshold on the fraction of acceptable XCO2 data. We find that relaxing the MODIS AOD threshold from 0.2 to 0.5 (at 550 nm), which is the goal for the CO2M, increases the fraction of acceptable data by 14 percentage points globally, and by 31 percentage points for urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Limiting the rise in global mean temperatures relies on reducing carbon dioxide (CO.sub.2) emissions and on the removal of CO.sub.2 by land carbon sinks. China is currently the single largest emitter of CO.sub.2, responsible for approximately 27 per cent (2.67 petagrams of carbon per year) of global fossil fuel emissions in 2017.sup.1. Understanding of Chinese land biosphere fluxes has been hampered by sparse data coverage.sup.2-4, which has resulted in a wide range of a posteriori estimates of flux. Here we present recently available data on the atmospheric mole fraction of CO.sub.2, measured from six sites across China during 2009 to 2016. Using these data, we estimate a mean Chinese land biosphere sink of -1.11 [plus or minus] 0.38 petagrams of carbon per year during 2010 to 2016, equivalent to about 45 per cent of our estimate of annual Chinese anthropogenic emissions over that period. Our estimate reflects a previously underestimated land carbon sink over southwest China (Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi provinces) throughout the year, and over northeast China (especially Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces) during summer months. These provinces have established a pattern of rapid afforestation of progressively larger regions.sup.5,6, with provincial forest areas increasing by between 0.04 million and 0.44 million hectares per year over the past 10 to 15 years. These large-scale changes reflect the expansion of fast-growing plantation forests that contribute to timber exports and the domestic production of paper.sup.7. Space-borne observations of vegetation greenness show a large increase with time over this study period, supporting the timing and increase in the land carbon sink over these afforestation regions. Newly available atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements from six sites across China during 2009 to 2016 indicate a larger land carbon sink than previously thought, reflecting increased afforestation., Author(s): Jing Wang [sup.1] [sup.2] [sup.3] [sup.4] , Liang Feng [sup.3] [sup.4] , Paul I. Palmer [sup.3] [sup.4] , Yi Liu [sup.1] [sup.2] , Shuangxi Fang [sup.5] [sup.6] , Hartmut [...]

The Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory (GeoCarb) was selected as NASA's second Earth Venture Mission (EVM-2). The scientific objectives of GeoCarb were to advance our knowledge of the carbon cycle, in particular, land–atmosphere fluxes of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO 2) and methane (CH 4) and the effects of these fluxes on the Earth's radiation budget. GeoCarb would retrieve column-integrated dry-air mole fractions of CO 2 (XCO2), CH 4 (XCH4) and CO (XCO), important for understanding tropospheric chemistry), in addition to solar-induced fluorescence (SIF), from hyperspectral resolution measurements in the O 2 A-band at 0.76 µ m, the weak CO 2 band at 1.6 µ m, the strong CO 2 band at 2.06 µ m, and a CH 4 /CO band at 2.32 µ m. Unlike its predecessors (OCO-2/3, GOSAT-1/2, TROPOMI), GeoCarb would be in a geostationary orbit with a sub-satellite point centered over the Americas. This orbital configuration combined with its high-spatial-resolution imaging capabilities would provide an unprecedented view of these quantities on spatial and temporal scales accurate enough to resolve sources and sinks to improve land–atmosphere CO 2 and CH 4 flux calculations and reduce the uncertainty of these fluxes. This paper will present a description of the GeoCarb instrument and the L2 retrieval algorithms which will be followed by simulation experiments to determine an error budget for each target gas. Several sources of uncertainty will be explored, including that from the instrument calibration parameters for radiometric gain, the instrument line shape (ILS), the polarization, and the geolocation pointing, in addition to forward model parameters including meteorology and spectroscopy, although there are some other instrument-related sources of uncertainty that are left out for this study, including that from "smile", the keystone effect, stray light, detector persistence, and scene inhomogeneity. The results indicate that the errors (1 σ) are less than the instrument's multi-sounding precision requirements of 1.2 ppm, 10 ppb, and 12 ppb (10 %), for XCO2 , XCH4 , and XCO , respectively. In particular, when considering the sources of uncertainty separately and in combination (all sources included), we find overall RMSEs of 1.06 ppm for XCO2 , 8.2 ppb for XCH4 , and 2.5 ppb for XCO , respectively. Additionally, we find that, as expected, errors in XCO2 and XCH4 are dominated by forward model and other systematic errors, while errors in XCO are dominated by measurement noise. It is important to note that the GeoCarb mission was canceled by NASA; however, the instrument is still in development and will be delivered to NASA, in full, with the hope that it will eventually be adopted in a future mission proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measurements of column-averaged dry air mole fraction of CO2 (termed XCO2) from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) contain systematic errors and regional-scale biases, often induced by forward model error or nonlinearity in the retrieval. Operationally, these biases are corrected for by a multiple linear regression model fit to co-retrieved variables that are highly correlated with XCO2 error. The operational bias correction is fit in tandem with a hand-tuned quality filter which limits error variance and reduces the regime of interaction between state variables and error to one that is largely linear. While the operational correction and filter are successful in reducing biases in retrievals, they do not allow for throughput or correction of data in which biases become nonlinear in predictors or features. In this paper, we demonstrate a clear improvement in the reduction in error variance over the operational correction by using a set of nonlinear machine learning models, one for land and one for ocean soundings. We further illustrate how the operational quality filter can be relaxed when used in conjunction with a nonlinear bias correction, which allows for an increase in sounding throughput by 14 % while maintaining the residual error in the operational correction. The method can readily be applied to future Atmospheric CO2 Observations from Space (ACOS) algorithm updates, to OCO-2's companion instrument OCO-3, and to other retrieved atmospheric state variables of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]