Anna Michalak

Director, Carnegie Climate and Resilience Hub



Data Drought in the Humid Tropics: How to Overcome the Cloud Barrier in Greenhouse Gas Remote Sensing


Journal article


Christian Frankenberg, Y. Bar-On, Yi Yin, Paul O. Wenberg, Daniel J. Jacob, Anna M. Michalak, Y. Bar-On, P. O. Wennberg
Geophysical Research Letters, 2024

Semantic Scholar DOI
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APA   Click to copy
Frankenberg, C., Bar-On, Y., Yin, Y., Wenberg, P. O., Jacob, D. J., Michalak, A. M., … Wennberg, P. O. (2024). Data Drought in the Humid Tropics: How to Overcome the Cloud Barrier in Greenhouse Gas Remote Sensing. Geophysical Research Letters.


Chicago/Turabian   Click to copy
Frankenberg, Christian, Y. Bar-On, Yi Yin, Paul O. Wenberg, Daniel J. Jacob, Anna M. Michalak, Y. Bar-On, and P. O. Wennberg. “Data Drought in the Humid Tropics: How to Overcome the Cloud Barrier in Greenhouse Gas Remote Sensing.” Geophysical Research Letters (2024).


MLA   Click to copy
Frankenberg, Christian, et al. “Data Drought in the Humid Tropics: How to Overcome the Cloud Barrier in Greenhouse Gas Remote Sensing.” Geophysical Research Letters, 2024.


BibTeX   Click to copy

@article{christian2024a,
  title = {Data Drought in the Humid Tropics: How to Overcome the Cloud Barrier in Greenhouse Gas Remote Sensing},
  year = {2024},
  journal = {Geophysical Research Letters},
  author = {Frankenberg, Christian and Bar-On, Y. and Yin, Yi and Wenberg, Paul O. and Jacob, Daniel J. and Michalak, Anna M. and Bar-On, Y. and Wennberg, P. O.}
}

Abstract

Diagnosing land‐atmosphere fluxes of carbon‐dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) is essential for evaluating carbon‐climate feedbacks. Greenhouse gas satellite missions aim to fill data gaps in regions like the humid tropics but obtain very few valid measurements due to cloud contamination. We examined data yields from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory alongside Sentinel‐2 cloud statistics. We find that the main contribution to low data yields are frequent shallow cumulus clouds. In the Amazon, the success rate in obtaining valid measurements vary from 0.1% to 1.0%. By far the lowest yields occur in the wet season, consistent with Sentinel‐2 cloud patterns. We find that increasing the spatial resolution of observations to ∼200 m would increase yields by 2–3 orders of magnitude and allow regular measurements in the wet season. Thus, the key to effective tropical greenhouse gas observations lies in regularly acquiring high‐spatial resolution data.



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