NASA’s carbon-tracking satellites get a cleaner decade of data
Scientists have released an upgraded, decade-long record of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere, built from measurements taken by two NASA satellites. The new version should give researchers a clearer picture of how carbon moves between the air, land and oceans — and how quickly it is building up.
The record comes from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, or OCO-2, which has been watching the atmosphere since September 2014, and OCO-3, which has worked from the International Space Station since 2019. Together, the two instruments capture more than a million observations of sunlight reflecting off Earth every day. A team led by Thomas E. Taylor described the upgrade in a paper published in the journal Earth and Space Science, reported on 30 October.
The upgrade is a new version of the software that turns the satellites’ raw light measurements into carbon dioxide figures. It calibrates the instruments better and handles clouds, airborne particles and sunlight glinting off the ocean more carefully. The team checked the new figures against a global network of ground-based instruments and found they matched more closely than the older version did. The two satellites also agree with each other to within 0.2 parts per million on average.
The record now runs from September 2014 through August 2026 and is freely available to researchers.
Why it matters
Carbon dioxide is the main gas driving human-caused warming, and knowing exactly where it rises and falls helps scientists work out which forests, oceans and human activities are absorbing or releasing it. Because the upgraded data are more consistent, researchers can now track changes month by month instead of year by year — useful for seeing how wildfires, droughts and El Niño events affect the carbon cycle almost as they happen. The data can also help judge whether climate policies are working.
What happens next
Scientists will use the record to study the carbon cycle in more detail and to check it against newer carbon-tracking satellites, including Japan’s GOSAT-GW and France’s MicroCarb, both launched in 2025. The European Space Agency is also building a three-satellite CO2M constellation, with launches planned for 2027 to 2029, to extend this kind of monitoring into the future.
This article is for general information and education only. It is not legal or financial advice.
Sources
- https://phys.org/news/2026-10-decade-carbon-dioxide-space.html (Phys.org / Eos, 30 October 2026)
- https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2026EA005360 (Earth and Space Science, October 2026)
