Seminar

Abstract

Human activities continue to perturb the Earth's carbon cycle, directly affecting the atmospheric concentration of potent greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane. In this talk, I will discuss the importance of quantifying these direct human influences, which will prove crucial to understanding future climate trajectories and natural feedbacks in the system. We will explore how human actions are impacting not only the long-term increase, but also the seasonal cycle of CO₂, and quantify the astonishing role of croplands in these changes. For methane, I will discuss the first example of identifying and quantifying anomalous CH₄ emissions from a region of energy production using space-based observations. I will also present new airborne observations of ethane (C₂H₆) over multiple oil and gas fields in Texas and North Dakota, and demonstrate how these observations can be used to both quantify ethane emissions and partition methane emissions to specific source sectors.