ESA CARBON SCIENCE CLUSTER – Research Opportunities 1: Near-Real-Time CARBON EXTREMES

There is a need for comprehensive, accurate, and low-latency information on land carbon fluxes to be underpinned by high resolution remote-sensing datastreams. A key policy-relevant challenge for the scientific community is the lack of a rapid quantification of carbon losses from recent mega droughts or fires despite numerous observations being available. The Near-Real-Time (NRT) Carbon Extremes project will address this major challenge, with the following objectives:

1. to develop robust observation-based estimates of changes in the land carbon sinks and their driving processes in near-real-time.
2. to realize a first NRT process-based system for land biogeochemistry.
3. to utilise output from the NRT system in combination with Earth Observation (EO)-data to diagnose and attribute the impact of climate extremes on the regional and global carbon cycle (Europe heatwave 2022, Brazil fires 2022, and a further region, to be defined depending on weather extreme occurrence, in 2023).

A key policy-relevant challenge for the scientific community is the lack of a rapid quantification of carbon losses from recent mega droughts or fires despite numerous observations being available. The NRT Carbon Extremes project will address this major challenge, with the following objectives:

To address these objectives, we will implement a near-real-time (NRT) carbon monitoring system for the terrestrial biosphere. For the first time the community will exploit ECVs and Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs) in NRT instead of with a lag of 2-3 years. We will apply 3 global DGVMs with NRT climate forcing data (ERA5), and combine their results with EO-derived products to attribute the net carbon flux to underlying processes (i.e. changes fluxes: primary production, respiration and fire; and carbon stocks).