Forging Community Consensus for an Integrated GHG and Winds Program

Workshop Overview:

To respond to climate change effectively, we need better information about how planetary ecosystems are responding to changes in the environment through carbon-climate feedbacks. There are several dedicated greenhouse gas missions, current and planned, focussed on observing changes in planetary greenhouse gas emissions from space; however, the ability to observe whether a reduction of emissions is attributable to a particular place, time, and process becomes entangled with the difficulties of observing concurrent changes in weather conditions. This gap prevents us from analyzing the impact of climate mitigation strategies and anticipating the fundamental interactions between the biosphere and climate change.

The overall goal of this KISS study on “Forging Community Consensus for an Integrated GHG and Winds Program” is to bring together expertise in wind observations and trace gas observation and attribution. Our work here will inform the design of a new satellite mission that will observe greenhouse gases and winds simultaneously. The resulting dataset will dramatically expand the boundaries of what is knowable about carbon-climate feedback through direct space-based observation. Workshop participants will determine together the questions that our group can answer in the near term and with new, future mission concepts.