[CAnet - news] Citizen Science, Cyber-infrastructure and Carbon Dixoide Emissions

For more information on this item please visit my blog at 
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
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[Here are a couple of interesting sites demonstrating the power of grids,
cyber-infrastructure, platforms and citizen science to measure the emission
and absorption of carbon dioxide. The NOAA "Carbon Tracker" seeks volunteers
to provide carbon dioxide measurements from around the globe and then uses
that information integrated with a number of databases and computational
models to assimilate the data and affects of forest fires, biosphere, ocean
absorption etc.  A similar project is the Canadian SAFORAH  which has many
objectives - of which one is to measure the amount of carbon dioxide
absorbed by Canadian forests. This cyber-infrastructure project also
supports studies in bird habitat across Canada. It uses Globus Toolkit v.4
at all of the SAFORAH participating sites. Currently, four Canadian Forestry
Centres located in Victoria British Columbia, Cornerbrook Newfoundland,
Edmonton, Alberta and Laurentian Québec are operationally connected to the
SAFORAH data grid.  SAFORAH offers Grid-enabled OGC services which are used
to increase interoperability of EO data between SAFORAH and other geospatial
information systems. The Grid-enabled OGC services consist of the following
main components: Grid-enabled Web Map Service (GWMS), Grid-enabled Web
Coverage Service (GWCS), Grid-enabled Catalog Service for Web (GCSW),
Grid-enabled Catalog Service Federation (GCSF), Control Grid Service (CGS)
and the Standard Grid Service Interfaces and OGC Standard User Interfaces.
Thanks to Erick Cecil and Hao Chen -- BSA]


For more information on SAFORAH please see
www.saforah.org

For more information on carbon tracker please see
www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/carbontracker/

A tool for Science, and Policy
CarbonTracker as a scientific tool will, together with long-term monitoring
of atmospheric CO2, help improve our understanding of how carbon uptake and
release from land ecosystems and oceans are responding to a changing
climate, increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 (the CO2 fertilization effect)
and other environmental changes, including human management of land and
oceans. The open access to all CarbonTracker results means that anyone can
scrutinize our work, suggest improvements, and profit from our efforts. This
will accelerate the development of a tool that can monitor, diagnose, and
possibly predict the behavior of the global carbon cycle, and the climate
that is so intricately connected to it.

CarbonTracker can become a policy support tool too. Its ability to
accurately quantify natural and anthropogenic emissions and uptake at
regional scales is currently limited by a sparse observational network. With
enough observations though, it will become possible to keep track of
regional emissions, including those from fossil fuel use, over long periods
of time. This will provide an independent check on emissions accounting,
estimates of fossil fuel use based on economic inventories, and generally,
feedback to policies aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions. This
independent measure of effectiveness of any policy, provided by the
atmosphere (where CO2 levels matter most!) itself is the bottom line in any
mitigation strategy.

CarbonTracker is intended to be a tool for the community and we welcome
feedback and collaboration from anyone interested. Our ability to accurately
track carbon with more spatial and temporal detail is dependent on our
collective ability to make enough measurements and to obtain enough air
samples to characterize variability present in the atmospheric. For example,
estimates suggest that observations from tall communication towers (>200m)
can tell us about carbon uptake and emission over a radius of only several
hundred kilometers. The map of observation sites shows how sparse the
current network is. One way to join this effort is by contributing
measurements. Regular air samples collected from the surface, towers or
aircraft are needed. It would also be very fruitful to expand use of
continuous measurements like the ones now being made on very tall (>200m)
communications towers. Another way to join this effort is by volunteering
flux estimates from your own work, to be run through CarbonTracker and
assessed against atmospheric CO2. Please contact us if you would like to get
involved and collaborate with us!

CarbonTracker uses many more continuous observations than previously taken.
The largest concentration of observations for now is from within North
America. The data are fed into a sophisticated computer model with 135
ecosystems and 11 ocean basins worldwide. The model calculates carbon
release or uptake by oceans, wildfires, fossil fuel combustion, and the
biosphere and transforms the data into a color-coded map of sources and
storage "sinks." One of the system's most powerful assets is its ability to
detect natural variations in carbon uptake and release by oceans and
vegetation, which could either aid or counteract societies' efforts to curb
fossil fuel emissions on a seasonal basis.




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These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.


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