On Nov. 12, Jeff Masek, the NASA Landsat 9 Project Scientist, participated in a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session, part of the AskScience AMA Series. Masek was one of three participating NASA scientists studying the role of carbon on Earth’s climate.
Here’s the AMA introduction:
Right now the land and ocean (over time) absorb about half of all CO2 emissions. But it’s not yet clear if that will keep up! The upcoming UN climate talks in Paris will focus on levels of human-caused emissions. We are focused on the natural response to rising emissions and how we can learn more about it.
We’ll answer questions about what NASA is doing to better understand how land and ocean ecosystems are responding to a warming planet and rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere — and what these ecosystem changes could mean for future climate change. Ask Us Anything!
Hi everyone! I am Natassa Romanou, an oceanographer at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. I work with climate models and observations and I am specifically interested in how oceans change under climate change and conversely, how oceans affect the global carbon cycle and therefore the rate at which Earth’s climate is changing. I am also involved in the planning of a very exciting NASA field campaign, EXPORTS, that will investigate the changes in ecosystems and carbon stocks and fluxes in the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans.
Hello all – I am Jeff Masek, a research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland. My scientific focus has been on understanding forest dynamics & their role in the terrestrial carbon cycle using long time series of satellite data. I also serve as the NASA Project Scientist for the Landsat program, which provides much of our global information on land use and land cover changes.
Hi everybody on-line. I’m David Schimel, a carbon scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. I look at how climate affects forest growth and loss using satellite and aircraft measurements an also measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I work on NASA’s new Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission that is giving us an entirely new way of understanding ecosystems and the carbon cycle.
Further Information:
+ Transcript of the AMA