An Observatory Spied on LA’s Carbon Emissions—From Space - WIRED

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Urban areas release over 70 percent of human-made carbon dioxide emissions that wind up in the atmosphere, and LA is no exception.

“What’s exciting about the OCO-3 result is that this is the first time we’ve gotten this kind of area map over a city like LA from space,” says Joshua Laughner, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who works on a global ground-based monitoring system called the Total Carbon Column Observing Network.

“With OCO-3, we have much better spatial coverage, and also temporal coverage, because it can now look at the city at different times,” says Caltech postdoctoral scholar Dien Wu, who works closely with the team in analyzing urban emissions.

Because carbon dioxide absorbs certain wavelengths of light, scientists can use this information to deduce how much is present in Earth’s atmosphere.

Then the OCO-3 team compared this satellite data to “clean air” readings already collected by a ground-based TCCON instrument at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in the desert far north of LA, away from sources of local emissions.

Despite the current limitations of space-based monitoring, Gurney notes that the new OCO-3 maps are particularly powerful because they make the issue personal.

But to get to this point, Gurney says, scientists need to combine the strengths of space-based monitoring with other efforts.

Eldering agrees, saying the goal isn’t to replace other methods of carbon dioxide monitoring but rather to figure out how to use them together to inform climate-change policy across the globe.