The American aerospace agency released a video showing the Earth literally breathing, regulating the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to the BBC.
NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) satellite monitored the movement of gas in 2015–2016. It was during this period that another El Niño cycle was in full swing on the planet.
As a result of this climatic phenomenon, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased significantly. The OCO satellite was able to show how rainforests reacted to this increase, being forced to survive a severe drought. The ability of forests to reduce the level of carbon dioxide, some of which has entered the Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, has seriously decreased.
For the scientific world, this study, the results of which were recently published in the journal Science, is of great importance, because it is expected that in conditions of global warming, El Niño will become more common.
“If in the future climatic conditions are more similar to the recent El Niño, there will be a problem: the Earth may actually lose some of the carbon-removing properties of the rainforest, and then the level of CO2 in the atmosphere will rise even faster,” explains Scott Denning. Member of the OCO Mission Science Team from the University of Colorado at Fort Collins. According to the scientist, this will only lead to even greater warming on the planet.
Recall that the 2015-2016 El Niño was one of the strongest in history, as was evident from the recorded increase in CO2 levels. Typically, the concentration of gas in the atmosphere increases each year by about two parts per million by volume (ppmv) of air molecules, equivalent to an additional four gigatons of CO2. Their volume is currently just over 400 ppmv. However, in the last El Niño cycle, the jump was 3 ppmv, or six gigatons of destructive gas.
This rate of increase in CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere has not been observed in 2000 years. However, during the period under review, anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions remained practically unchanged. This means that the reason lies in some kind of non-human failure in the process of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
It was thanks to the OCO satellite that this connection was discovered. For example, at this time in South America, the most severe drought in the past 30 years reduced the ability of vegetation to consume CO2. In Africa, higher average temperatures have increased the decomposition of plant material, which also results in the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Promotional video:
Parallel to this, peatland forest fires were raging in Asia, especially Indonesia, due to the harsh heat, releasing carbon accumulated over thousands of years. Taken together, these processes led to such a sharp jump in the CO2 content in the Earth's atmosphere.
Meanwhile, Europe is soon planning to launch a whole network of Sentinel-7 satellites, which will cover more territory than OCO, while maintaining high measurement accuracy. Thanks to S7, scientists will be able to track the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide in more detail.
Moreover, it is argued that such an orbital network will also convince individual states to take additional measures to reduce carbon emissions in accordance with international agreements such as the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015.