Nasa carbon space observatory 'watches Earth breathe'
By Jonathan Amos
"If future climate is more like this recent El Niño, the trouble is the Earth may actually lose some of the carbon removal services we get from these tropical forests, and then CO2 will increase even faster in the atmosphere," explained Scott Denning, an OCO science team member from Colorado State University in Fort Collins. That would amplify warming, he told reporters.
But in this extraordinary El Niño period, the jump was 3ppmv, per year - or six gigatonnes.
It is a rate of increase not seen on Earth in at least 2,000 years.
OCO is very accurate in its measurements but it only sees a very narrow swath (10km wide) of the Earth when it flies overhead.
Europe is planning a constellation of satellites called Sentinel-7 that will map CO2 over a much wider area, but still at very high precision.
S7 will trace in much more detail the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide.
This orbiting network would even make it possible to police individual countries' commitments to reduce carbon emissions under international agreements such as the Paris climate accord of 2015.