Oregon Public Broadcasting

Does the Northwest produce more of a key global warming gas than its plant life absorbs?  An upcoming satellite launch promises an answer.

The satellite will track sources and “sinks” of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, all from an orbit hundreds of miles above the earth.

In Pullman, correspondent Tom Banse talked to a scientist involved the project.

Washington State University professor George Mount is on the trail of a mystery.  Call it the mystery of the vanishing carbon dioxide, a key global warming gas.

George Mount: “About half of the CO2 that is produced stays in the atmosphere.”

But the other half disappears somewhere....

George Mount: “A lot of it goes into the ocean.  Obviously, a lot of it goes into plants.”

Places that capture a lot of carbon dioxide are called “sinks.”

George Mount: “People are very interested scientifically and politically in where on the globe these sinks of carbon dioxide are.”

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to conclude that owning a carbon sink could be a valuable thing in a world worried about global warming. Where it does come in handy to be a rocket scientist is in sizing up the sinks.

George Mount has lots of pictures of rockets in his office, though he’s technically an atmospheric scientist.  Mount is helping design and test NASA’s first satellite to track carbon dioxide.

George Mount: “The idea of the satellite was to make extremely accurate measurements of CO2 from space where you can get global coverage of the CO2 concentration and can then start to quantify where it’s coming from and where it’s going.”

The Pullman-based professor is part of an international team working under the direction of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  A former University of Washington researcher also advises NASA on the $300 million project.

Perhaps you’re wondering how a satellite measures a colorless, odorless, invisible gas.

George Mount: “CO2 is a copious absorber of infrared light.  The photons of light that travel from the sun go through the atmosphere once, hit the ground, reflect back up, go through the atmosphere again and then up to the satellite sensor. So it is possible to deduce the abundance of the molecule.”

George Mount says the timing of the upcoming launch couldn’t be better.  Lots of countries, states, even some counties and corporations are trying to figure out how their carbon sources and sinks balance.

In the Northwest, an obvious sink would be our vast tracts of public and private forestland.

Timber giant Weyerhaeuser owns more than two million acres in the region.  Spokesman Frank Mendizabel says the company has found it challenging to determine how much carbon dioxide its tree farms soak up.

Frank Mendizabel: “It’s a very difficult thing to measure and has a lot of technical details yet to be worked out.”

But armed with better data, might there be potential to squeeze a new profit stream out of planting trees?

Frank Mendizabel: “The question of carbon offsets or carbon sequestration and the value of it or the amount of it is kind of an open question. There is a lot of data being gathered. Weyerhaeuser is paying a lot of attention to that whole subject.”

NASA plans to launch its Orbiting Carbon Observatory from Vandenberg Air Force Base around the end of this year.

Greenhouse gas concentrations for any part of the planet should become available a few months later.

Online:

NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory

WSU Laboratory for Atmospheric Research