ROSES 2023: A.6 Carbon Monitoring System
Funding Agency:
- NASA
The NASA Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) is a forward-looking initiative designed to make significant contributions to characterizing, quantifying, understanding, and predicting the evolution of global carbon sources, sinks, and fluxes through improved monitoring of terrestrial and aquatic carbon stocks and fluxes. NASA’s approach toward a carbon monitoring system has emphasized exploitation of current and future satellite remote sensing resources, computational capabilities, scientific knowledge, airborne science capabilities, and end-to-end system expertise that are major strengths of the NASA Earth Science program. Significant effort is being devoted to rigorous evaluation of the carbon monitoring products being generated, as well as to the characterization and quantification of errors and uncertainties in those products. The initial emphasis has been on regional, national, and global satellite-based carbon monitoring products relevant to national needs for completely transparent carbon and terrestrial biomass inventory processes that provide statistical precision and accuracy with geospatially explicit associated attribute data. NASA’s approach considers data and expertise that are the domain of other U.S. Government agencies and anticipates continuing close communication and/or partnerships with those agencies and their scientific and technical experts as U.S. national efforts toward integrated carbon monitoring mature.
NASA has established a Carbon Monitoring System Science Team (CMS ST) that will include members from all NASA CMS investigations. The CMS ST is responsible for providing broad research community involvement in the development and evaluation of NASA CMS products; coordinating their NASA-funded CMS activities to ensure maximum science, management, and policy return; and providing scientific, technical, and policy-relevant inputs to help identify potential future research topics for NASA CMS activities. As current proposals are completed, their Principal Investigators (PIs) will rotate off the CMS ST and be replaced by the newly selected investigators from this program element. The work so far conducted in this CMS prototyping effort has leveraged the much larger investments currently made by NASA in remote sensing observations of carbon-related properties of the Earth, as well as in carbon cycle science research.
Research Solicited
NASA requests proposals for investigations that will advance products toward the CMS end goal: development of prototype carbon monitoring systems from an Earth’s system perspective. Areas of interest include terrestrial, atmospheric, and aquatic realms. Proposal emphasis must be directed toward continued development of the established CMS pilot studies (see https://carbon.nasa.gov), synergistic advancements from past CMS activities, as well as acquisition, quantification, and development of prototype CMS system capabilities that can improve existing and develop new data products toward achieving the levels of precision and accuracy required by current carbon trading activities (e.g., certification of emissions reductions). Successful applicants will also become NASA CMS Science Team (ST) members.
Various
$3,500,000
March 5, 2024
Kathy A. Hibbard Telephone: (202) 358-0682 Email: Kathleen.A.Hibbard@nasa.gov