Project Details
Projekt
CoMet 2.0 (Carbon Dioxide and Methane) Mission for HALO
Applicant
Dr. Andreas Fix
Subject Area
Atmospheric Science
Term
since 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442652805
Climate Change is one of the greatest societal challenges of the 21st century. The dominant source of Global Warming is the increase of anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the Earth`s atmosphere. The two most important of those species are carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Together they account for ~81% of the anthropogenic radiative forcing. Further increases in the atmospheric abundance of these gases are predicted to result in a warmer climate. However, uncertainties in our knowledge of the budgets of these gases, which are determined by their sources, sinks, and inadequately understood feedback mechanisms, limit the accuracy of current climate change projections from the local to the global scale. In order to reliably predict the climate of our planet, and to help constrain political conventions on greenhouse gas avoidance (e.g. Paris Agreement, 2015), adequate knowledge of the sources and sinks of these greenhouse gases, their feedbacks, and accurate quantification of natural versus anthropogenic sources is mandatory. In spite of the recognized importance of this issue, our current understanding of sources and sinks of the gases CO2 and CH4 is still poor and not sufficient to address the needs of science and policy-makers. The CoMet series of HALO missions, thus, is intended to address these deficiencies by a multi-disciplinary approach combining aircraft measurements, models, and satellite data. By means of aircraft measurements using an advanced scientific payload consisting of a suite of active and passive remote sensing and in-situ instruments onboard the German research aircraft HALO pilot studies shall gather data about GHG gradients on small to sub-continental scales and add important remote sensing and in-situ data information about local emission sources of GHGs and for the inverse modelling approach for regional budgeting. While for the CoMet 1.0 campaign in 2018 this has successfully been demonstrated for dedicated sources and regions in Europe, the objective of CoMet 2.0 is to apply the instrumentation and the elaborated methods to the highly relevant GHG source and sink regions such as the permafrost areas and tropical wetlands. Wetland vegetation takes up and stores carbon; its decomposition releases CO2 and CH4. These processes make the global wetlands one of the most important albeit least understood sources and sinks in the global methane and CO2 budget. In the framework of two missions, CoMet 2.0 shall therefore investigate the contribution of major arctic (e.g. Hudson Bay Lowlands, Mackenzie River Basin) and tropical wetlands in South America (e.g. Amazon Basin, Pantanal) to the GHG budget and strive to separate wetland emissions from biomass burning and overlapping anthropogenic sources that overlap with the natural signatures. Furthermore, the measurements shall support the observations of current and future satellites since it is exactly in those areas where satellite instruments have significant weaknesses.
DFG Programme
Infrastructure Priority Programmes
