The NASA Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) is a forward-looking initiative designed to make significant contributions to characterizing, quantifying, understanding, and predicting the evolution of global carbon sources, sinks, and fluxes through improved monitoring of terrestrial and aquatic carbon stocks and fluxes. Initially implemented in response to language in NASA’s 2010 Congressional Appropriation, this program is now considered to be an important part of NASA’s Carbon Cycle and Ecosystem focus area, and as presently implemented, supports research and coordinates projects for the development of prototype carbon monitoring systems.
NASA’s approach toward a carbon monitoring system has emphasized exploitation of current and future satellite remote sensing resources, computational capabilities, scientific knowledge, airborne science capabilities, and end-to-end system expertise that are major strengths of the NASA Earth Science program. Significant effort is being devoted to rigorous evaluation of the carbon monitoring products being generated, as well as to the characterization and quantification of errors and uncertainties in those products. The initial emphasis has been on regional, national, and global satellite-based carbon monitoring products relevant to national needs for completely transparent carbon and terrestrial biomass inventory processes that provide statistical precision and accuracy with geospatially explicit associated attribute data. NASA’s approach considers data and expertise that are the domain of other U.S. Government agencies and anticipates continuing close communication and/or partnerships with those agencies and their scientific and technical experts as U.S. national efforts toward integrated carbon monitoring mature.
NASA also recognizes a need for complementary local-scale (airborne and in-situ) information to demonstrate quantitative remote sensing methods to evaluate carbon source, sink, and flux estimates to aid in scaling up from project, county, and/or state levels on land and within different aquatic regions and for essential evaluation of regional-, national-, and global-scale carbon monitoring products. Such work is critically important for advancing research capabilities toward an understanding of Earth’s carbon cycle that is relevant for decision-making communities. Additionally, the current approach lays the groundwork for CMS-related applications of NASA and non-NASA satellite sensors currently on orbit (i.e., Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2); ESA’s Sentinel 5-Precursor; ECOSTRESS; Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2; Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation; and the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3) and missions in development or formulation (i.e., Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, and ocean Ecosystem (PACE); NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR); ESA’s Earth Explorer Biomass and FLuorescence EXplorer (FLEX) mission, the Geosynchronous Littoral Imaging and Monitoring Radiometer (GLIMR) and the upcoming Earth System Observatory, which includes the Surface Biology and Geology designated observable).
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