Departmental Seminar: Remote Sensing of Atmospheric Carbonyl sulfide and Methane for Understanding of Carbon Cycle, Climate Change, And Sustainability by Dr. Le Kuai
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Remote Sensing of Atmospheric Carbonyl sulfide and
Methane for Understanding of Carbon Cycle,
Climate Change, And Sustainability
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by Dr. Le Kuai
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Assistant Researcher, UCLA
Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science Engineering
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Understanding the processes controlling greenhouse gases is essential for designing appropriate policies to help mitigate climate change. With advanced technology, important carbon-containing anthropogenic greenhouses gases such as CO2, CH4 and carbonyl sulfide (OCS) have been monitored daily and globally by satellite instruments, including NASA OCO-2 (for CO2), JAXA GOSAT (for CO2 and CH4), and NASA Aura TES (for CO2 and OCS).
Terrestrial photosynthesis is the primary CO2 sink over land and is important for understanding the fate of atmospheric CO2. Previous attempts measuring CO2 alone cannot accurately characterize photosynthetic intake because of the simultaneous, CO2-releasing process of respiration. OCS, which is involved in photosynthesis only, has therefore been introduced as a new tracer of photosynthesis. I will discuss my work on the retrieval algorithm of free tropospheric OCS and the inverse modeling of OCS surface flux, using TES thermal infrared observations at the top of atmosphere. This work presents the first evidence of the tropical oceanic missing source over the Indo-Pacific region.
CH4, being the second most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas, impacts on both climate and air quality but our knowledge about the CH4 cycle is far from complete. CH4 emissions from fugitive sources such as from livestock feeding lots, oil tanks, and natural gas facilities are believed to be underestimated. These small-scale sources are hard to be detected from space. The NASA JPL鈥檚 airborne Hyperspectral Thermal Emission Spectrometer (HyTES) has recently been proposed to survey fugitive CH4 emissions over city-scale regions. I will show the quantitative retrieval of HyTES detected CH4 plumes from the Kern River Oil Field (KROF) near Bakersfield and the recent Aliso Canyon gas leaking, California.
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Thursday, March 16, 2017 | 3:30 p.m. | Burnside Hall | Room 934
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Coffee will be available. 听We hope you will be able to attend!