:: CarbonTracker-Asia ::

Information

Results

Link

CarbonTracker-Asia

Welcome to the website of CarbonTracker-Asia at
National Institute of Meteorological Research

What is CarbonTracker-Asia?
What is CarbonTracker-Asia? Carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas influenced by human activities and widely considered to be largely responsible for global warming, has been increasing steadily in the atmosphere. About half of the CO2 released to the atmosphere is absorbed by various land and ocean processes, but spatial and temporal variability of these carbon sinks is not well understood. Accurate estimation of the global distribution of CO2 flux is important not only for making a basis for imposing the emission restriction of on each country under international agreement, but also for understanding natural processes. The carbon cycle describes the exchanges(fluxes) between the various carbon reservoirs: land biosphere, ocean, atmosphere, and fossil fuels. Only a few of the observations give direct information on the fluxes that constitute the global carbon cycle, and none offer an adequate direct picture of spatial and temporal patterns. It is therefore necessary to infer these indirectly. Numerous methods have been developed for this, all based on the synthesis of information from both observations and models.		CarbonTracker-Asia column CO2weather for 2014. The images are created by 1degree longitude by 1degree latitude Asia grid results.

One common approach for estimation of CO2 exchanges is to use atmospheric transport inversions. The inversion (CarbonTracker) integrates our current understanding of CO2 fluxes between the atmosphere and the other carbon reservoirs optimally consistent with both atmospheric transport and observations. Therefore CarbonTracker is a new product that combines measured atmospheric concentrations with other information to enhance the utility and value of carbon cycle information to society, economies and ecosystem management, as we respond to the climate related challenges of the 21^st century. CarbonTracker was originally developed by NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory to focus on North America. Here the system is applied in Asia as CarbonTracker-Asia cooperated with ESRL/NOAA.

Why is CarbonTracker needed?

Attention to securing practical benefits for humankind plays an equal role with the quest to acquire new knowledge about the Earth system. One of the fundamental quest (climate change issue) is where CO2 generated by human activities is coming from and going to? Carbontracker has been developed to answer this quest. The vision of CarbonTracker calls for "advances in fundamental understanding of the carbon cycle and increased application of this understanding to serve the nation and the people of the world". CarbonTracker as a scientific tool will, together with long-term monitoring of atmospheric CO2, help improve our understanding of the present state and future behavior of the global carbon cycle, particularly the factors that control levels of atmospheric CO2 and feedbacks to climate. CarbonTracker can become a policy support tool too. Efforts to control climate change require the stabilization of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. This can only be achieved through a drastic reduction of global CO2 emissions. Therefore the accurate, reliable and independent system (CarbonTracker) is needed for monitoring and assessing the effectiveness of emission reduction activities on atmospheric CO2 levels.