About

RECCAP-2 Climate Space project

The ESA-funded RECCAP-2 Climate Space project aims to produce new and more accurate estimates of the greenhouse gas budgets of key regions of the world impacted by natural processes and anthropogenic drivers. The project relies on atmospheric inversion models to map all fluxes of CO2 and CH4, and on new estimates of carbon stocks in trees retrieved from high and very high-resolution satellite imagery, maps of northern peatlands and inland water greenhouse gas fluxes. The regions studied are the Amazon, Siberia, Europe and Northern peatlands. The greenhouse flux estimates from EO data integrate across different Essential Climate Variables of the ESA Climate Space program. The fluxes and carbon stock changes will be reconciled with national greenhouse gas inventories and annually updated for the Global Stock Take of the Paris Agreement.

Focuses Issues

1. Reducing uncertainties in regional CO2 and CH4 fluxes due to ecosystems response to climatic variations and land-use changes.
2. Improve the alignment between bottom-up (inventory-based) and top-down (atmospheric observation-based) approaches for global carbon and methane budgets.
3. Use EO-data to overcome some limitations of national inventories in capturing rapid changes (e.g., droughts, extreme fires).
4. Deliver frequent EO-data, products and analyses to monitor countries' progress in meeting emission reduction pledges under the Paris Agreement.

The Project Aims To

• Develop a global framework combining satellite data and data-driven modeling approaches to estimate GHG fluxes over sic key global regions and compare, reconcile them with national inventories.
• Reduce the imbalance between sources and sinks in the global carbon budget by targeting key regions where uncertainties are particularly high.
• Reconcile EO-based GHG flux estimates with inventory methodologies, improving monitoring of land-use changes and natural fluxes.

Output of the RECCAP2-CS Project

• High-resolution spatially explicit CO2 and CH4 fluxes for critical regions, including Europe, Siberia, Amazon, and Arctic peatlands.
• Integration of satellite-based ECVs into bottom-up and top-down approaches to improve regional and global carbon budgets.
• A reconciled framework that supports inventory compilers and climate policy stakeholders with enhanced tools for tracking GHG emissions and removals.
• Annual updates of global biomass carbon changes based on passive microwave time series to better understand land carbon stock change anomalies and trends related to extreme events and land-use changes.

The project is structured into three phases:

• Phase 1: EO-based GHG accounting system setup for each region and defining scientific requirements, including stages for requirements specification and system design with iterative feedback.
• Phase 2: developing data processing codes and producing regional GHG budgets from bottom-up, top-down, and inventory approaches, along with uncertainty assessments and initial synthesis for case study regions.
• Phase 3: implementing a pre-operational system for regional GHG budgets, enabling annual updates (year n-1) and providing diagnostics, user feedback, and data visualization to ensure usability and integration with reporting procedures.

Each phase emphasizes collaboration with ESA and the inventory community to refine system requirements, results, and performance.