On 12 December 2015, the 21st yearly session of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change (UNFCCC) reached its objective to for the first time achieve a global agreement on reduction of climate change. The parties commit to limit the global warming by 2100, well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius (UNFCCC, 2015). They have agreed to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases and, amongst other actions, to implement a transparency framework for monitoring the impact of the Nationally Determined Contributions.
In this context a global CO2 monitoring capacity using an ensemble of independent, observation-based atmospheric data is needed to complement this bottom-up transparency framework and contribute to increase the reliability and accuracy of the national reports (see Pinty et al., 2017). The European Commission is suggesting a CO2 monitoring space mission as a component of a the monitoring capacity, which is planned to be established in the framework of the European Earth Observation Programme Copernicus (for details see, e.g, here).
CCFFDAS is a project funded by the European Space Agency to investigate, using a comprehensive Carbon Cycle/Fossil Fuel Data Assimilation System (CCFFDAS), the potential of a CO2 monitoring space mission for reducing uncertainties in the quantification of fossil fuel CO2 emissions worldwide.
The main objectives of the study are to: