Since CO2 has been recognized as the most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas owing to its significant impact on global warming and climate change, there have been a substantial number of studies that have focused on investigating the status of CO2 in the atmosphere in the past and present, and how it will change in the future.
The United Nations Climate Change Conference (24th Conference of the Parties, COP24) will conduct a climate change action global stock-take for each of five years starting in 2023. Therefore, in support of these efforts, we need a new method to verify how much human emissions impact the global carbon cycle and climate change.
The 1st Chinese Carbon Dioxide Monitoring Satellite Mission, known as TanSat, which was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the China Meteorological Administration, launched in December 2016 for the purpose of monitoring CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere over the globe. The 1st TanSat global map of CO2 dry-air mixing ratio (XCO2) measurements over land was released as a version-1 data product with an accuracy of 2.11 ppmv (parts per million by volume).
Read more at Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Image: Configuration of the TanSat spacecraft. Credit: SIMIT