First-of-its-kind detection of reduced human carbon dioxide emissions

by Jessica Merzdorf Evans,NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

https://phys.org/news/2022-04-first-of-its-kind-human-carbon-dioxide-emissions.html

For the first time, researchers have spotted short-term, regional fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) around the globe due to emissions from human activities.

Using a combination of NASA satellites and atmospheric modeling, the scientists performed a first-of-its-kind detection of human CO₂emissions changes. The new study uses data from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) to measure drops in CO₂emissions during the COVID-19 pandemic from space. With daily and monthly data products now available to the public, this opens new possibilities for tracking the collective effects of human activities on CO₂concentrations in near real-time.

Previous studies investigated the effects of lockdowns early in the pandemic and found that global CO₂levels dropped slightly in 2020. However, by combining OCO-2’s high-resolution data with modeling and data analysis tools from…