A54D-03
Preliminary Results from the First Year of Operations of the NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2)

Friday, 18 December 2015: 16:30
3012 (Moscone West)
David Crisp, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States
Abstract:
On September 6, 2014, OCO-2 began routinely returning almost 106 soundings over the sunlit hemisphere each day. Over 10% of these soundings are sufficiently cloud free to yield full-column estimates of the column-averaged CO2 dry air mole fraction, XCO2. Nadir soundings over land yield XCO2 estimates with single-sounding random errors of 0.5 - 1 ppm at solar zenith angles (SZA) < 60° while ocean glint soundings yield precisions near 0.5 ppm at SZA < 70°. Nadir soundings over the ocean and glint soundings over high-latitude land are less precise. Initially, OCO-2 recorded only nadir soundings or glint soundings on alternate, 16-day ground-track repeat cycles. This provided adequate coverage of the globe each month, but produced 16-day gaps in ocean coverage while observing nadir, and similar gaps over high-latitude land while observing glint. In July 2015, this strategy was modified to alternate between glint and nadir soundings on consecutive orbits to yield more continuous coverage each day.

While XCO2 and other products are being validated to identify and correct biases, global XCO2 maps are starting to reveal the most robust features of the atmospheric carbon cycle. XCO2 enhancements co-located with intense fossil fuel emissions in eastern U.S. and eastern China are most obvious in the fall, when the north-south XCO2 gradient is small. Enhanced XCO2 coincident with biomass burning in the Amazon, central Africa, and Indonesian is also obvious in the fall. In mid spring, when the north-south XCO2 gradient was largest, these sources were less apparent in global maps. From late May to mid-July, OCO-2 maps show a 2-3% reduction in XCO2 across the northern hemisphere, as the land biosphere rapidly absorbs CO2. As the carbon cycle community continues to analyze these OCO-2 data, quantitative estimates of regional-scale emission sources and natural sinks are expected to emerge. This presentation will summarize the OCO-2 mission status, early products, and near-term plans.