Quantification of atmospheric carbon dioxide from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES East)
For climate scientists and policymakers, this work provides a method to observe atmospheric CO2 variability at unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution using existing satellite data, enabling detection of local-scale CO2 fluxes.
The authors developed a physics-guided neural network to estimate dry-air column CO2 mole fraction (XCO2) from GOES-East satellite data, achieving 10-minute temporal resolution over the western hemisphere. The model captures XCO2 enhancements over urban areas and drawdown over agricultural regions, though precision is lower than dedicated instruments.
There is a growing urgency to track greenhouse gasses with the resolution, precision and accuracy needed to support independent verification of $CO_2$ fluxes at local to global scales. The current generation of space-based sensors, however, only provides sparse observations in space and time. This challenge has fueled interest in the potential use of data from existing missions originally developed for other applications for inferring global greenhouse gas variability. The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) onboard the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-East), operational since 2017, provides full coverage of much of the western hemisphere at 10-minute intervals from geostationary orbit at 16 wavelengths at an approximately 2$km^2$ spatial resolution. Here, we leverage this high spatial coverage and temporal revisit to develop a single-pixel, physics-guided neural network to estimate dry-air column $CO_2$ mole fraction ($XCO_2$). The model employs a time series of GOES-East's 16 spectral bands, ECMWF ERA5 lower tropospheric meteorology, MODIS surface reflectance, solar and satellite viewing geometry, and day of year. Training used collocated GOES-East and OCO-2/OCO-3 observations. We also present case studies illustrating the use of the model to observe $XCO_2$ enhancements over urban areas and drawdown over agricultural regions. Overall, while the precision of GOES-East derived $XCO_2$ can never rival that of dedicated instruments, the unprecedented combination of contiguous geographic coverage, 10-minute temporal frequency, and multi-year record offers the potential to observe aspects of atmospheric $CO_2$ variability currently unseen from space.