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About CMS
Carbon Monitoring System Plan
The Fiscal Year 2010 Congressional Appropriation directed NASA to initiate work towards a Carbon Monitoring System (CMS). NASA’s allocation of funding for these pre-phase A and pilot initiatives for the development of a carbon monitoring system reflects a bottoms-up agreement on products and work assignments across the NASA Centers, together with a programmatic focus on smaller-scale (e.g., local to regional) biomass products. The work to be conducted in this prototyping effort leverages the much larger investment currently made by NASA in satellite observations of carbon-related properties of the Earth, as well as in carbon cycle science and carbon management research. It also takes into account the efforts of other Federal agencies, especially as coordinated through the Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group of the US Global Change Research Program.
The current focus is on two pilot products and a scoping study. A brief description of each of these follows:
Pilot Product Studies
The NASA plan has a primary focus on the near-term development of two pilot products – one on terrestrial biomass and one on integrated emission/uptake. A brief summary of each of these is as follows:
- Terrestrial biomass product – Will utilize satellite and in situ data to produce national quantitative estimates (and uncertainties) of aboveground terrestrial vegetation biomass. Will utilize satellite data, data from advanced airborne sensors, and new in situ field data to demonstrate an ability to produce improved quantitative estimates, with reduced uncertainties, of aboveground terrestrial vegetation biomass and carbon stocks at local to regional-scales (i.e., county/state) for selected regions. For both national and regional/local estimates, will develop and evaluate methodologies for aggregating to project, county, state, and federal levels and assess the ability of these results to meet the nation’s need for monitoring carbon storage / sequestration. Will develop and evaluate a new model-data fusion approach to assess changes in carbon stocks over multi-year periods.
- Integrated emission/uptake (flux) product – Will combine satellite data with modeled atmospheric transport initiated by observationally-constrained terrestrial and oceanic models to tie the atmospheric observations to surface exchange processes and use the results to estimate the atmosphere-biosphere CO2 exchange processes
These products will be produced at NASA Centers (i.e., Goddard Space Flight Center, Ames Research Center, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) working in close coordination.
Scoping Study/Workshop:
The goal of the Scoping Study is to identify research, products, and analysis system evolutions required to support carbon policy and management as global observing capability increases. This will be a process involving significant community interaction. It was begun with a planning session held at the NASA Terrestrial Ecology Principal Investigators meeting in San Diego, CA, in March, 2010. A significant workshop was held in Boulder, CO on July 13-14, 2010. Approximately 70 people from around the United States were invited, representing a broad range of government agencies (NASA, NOAA, USDA, USGS, EPA, DOE laboratories) and academia. See NASA Carbon Monitoring System Scoping Study Workshop Final Report.
The Scoping Study will develop a plan for NASA to support carbon policy and carbon management decisions (e.g., treaty verification, adaptation information support at local and regional scales). The study will identify what products (with associated resolution and quality) can be provided over time (e.g. near-term and long-term). This effort will examine how modeling and assimilation programs can be best positioned to benefit from the new observing capability, what additional observations (in-situ, airborne, space) are needed to fill information gaps or support existing and planned capabilities, and what types of computational and data delivery systems are needed to fully capitalize on new observational capabilities. Also, the Scoping Study will use the NASA systems engineering, as well as NASA technology transfer mechanisms to fully utilize private sector capabilities.
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