CIRES/NOAA Global Monitoring Division scientists are taking a summer road trip! For the next three weeks we will be launching balloon-borne instruments called AirCores. These air samplers hitch a ride on large weather balloons and capture vertical profiles of greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, as well as carbon monoxide, from the surface to the stratosphere.
Our three AirCore “pit stops” will be in Palmdale, California; Lamont, Oklahoma; and Park Falls, Wisconsin. Why these locations? They are all home to Fourier Transform Spectrometers (FTS) within the global Total Column Carbon Observing Network (TCCON). These FTS measure total column greenhouse gases, and we will be comparing measurements of the AirCore greenhouse gases to those of the TCCON spectrometers, as well as other smaller, more portable ground-based EM27/SUN spectrometers.
We aim to evaluate and improve estimates of atmospheric column greenhouse gas levels retrieved from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) satellite. With these comparisons, our goal is to improve our understanding of carbon cycling between the land, ocean, and atmosphere, and to evaluate the efficiency of fossil fuel emissions reductions as seen from space.