The team led by Dr. Randy Kawa, (PI, NASA GSFC) working alongside Dr. George Hurtt (Co-I, UMD GEOG), Dr. Paul Newman (Co-I, NASA GSFC), Dr. Tom Hanisco (Co-I, NASA GSFC), Dr. Glenn Wolfe (Co-I, NASA GSFC/JCET), Dr. Glenn Diskin (Co-I, NASA LaRC) and Dr. George Collatz (Collaborator, NASA GSFC), is awarded a research grant of $400,000 by NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System program for their project titled “Airborne Eddy Flux Measurements for Validation/Evaluation of High-Resolution MRV Systems”. The project represents a new collaboration between GEOG and GSFC researchers.

This research directly addresses advanced remote sensing-based approaches to carbon emissions monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV), and the need to improve the characterization and quantification of errors and uncertainties in existing NASA CMS products. The team will produce a data set of regional GHG flux estimates and their statistical errors for use in this and other analyses, and will provide a more comprehensive validation/evaluation of the UMD MRV prototype processes and products for the region. The work is timely both for maturation of the MRV prototype system as well as to make use of the new airborne experimental capability. This effort will set the stage for experimentally evaluating other important carbon fluxes for CMS. It has the potential to connect biomass and biomass change distributions to integrated land-atmosphere carbon flux estimated from inverse methods and prognostic models.