Motivation

Rising concentrations of CO₂ and CH₄ are the driver of climate change and reflect a complex mix of natural and human sources and sinks. For example, plants and oceans absorb about half of human CO₂ emissions every year, slowing the progression of climate change. Tracking progress to combat climate change requires good quality understanding of sources and sinks and underlying processes, which come from a variety of complex modeling tools that help scientists calculate the exchanges of CO₂ and CH₄ at the Earth’s surface from atmospheric data. This workshop, supported by the newly-established US Greenhouse Gas Center, aims to develop a future workforce skilled at using existing tools as well as building their own tools to understand sources and sinks of greenhouse gases.

Workshop goals

The goal of the workshop is to present and provide guidance and instruction of the state of the art in atmospheric data assimilation techniques needed to support current and future GHG observing systems. This includes different flux estimation techniques for GHGs, and retrieval techniques for estimating atmospheric GHGs from space-based and surface-based remote sensing platforms.