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Satellite provides insights on CO2

───   07:50 Sat, 14 Oct 2017

Satellite provides insights on CO2  | News Article

A Nasa satellite has provided remarkable new insights on how CO2 is moved through the Earth's atmosphere.


BBC reports the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) tracked the behaviour of the gas in 2015/16 - a period when the planet experienced a major El Niño event, which boosts the amount of CO2 in the air. 

The US space agency's OCO satellite was able to show how that increase was controlled by the response of tropical forests to heat and drought.

The forests' ability to draw down carbon dioxide, some of it produced by human activity, was severely curtailed.

The science has significant implications because the kind of conditions associated with El Niños are expected to become much more common under global warming.










BBC

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