Measuring Chlorophyll Fluorescence and CO2 Levels

By: Anahi Mendieta

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory also known as OCO-2 was successfully launched on July 2nd from the Vandenberg Air force station in California. The OCO-2 satellite is currently on its mission to measure chlorophyll fluorescence (a wavelength emitted during photosynthesis) and CO2 levels in Earth’s atmosphere. Dr. Frankenberg, a member of NASA who is currently working at JPL (The Jet Propulsion Laboratory) in Pasadena, said, "The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will be able to measure CO2 absorption features from plants to calculate CO2 amounts in the atmosphere." The OCO-2 is based on the original OCO-1 mission, which failed to launch after a failure with the rocket release mechanism. As a result, the OCO-1 has been replaced by the new and improved Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite, also known as OCO-2. Dr. Christian Frankenberg said, "The OCO-2 also got its name as a result of being an allegy to the CO2 molecule, which is the satellite's primary mission objective." The new innovation promises to detect and acquire measurements of the human produced greenhouse gas driving changes in Earth's atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, which is produced by the burning of carbon by humans, is currently causing global warming, which affects vegetation that provides oxygen to our human civilization. Dr. Frankenberg believes the importance of measuring and obtaining precise measurements of photosynthetic activity is great because it is the biggest carbon uptake in the world. Dr. Frankenberg knows that, "Not all the CO2 we emit is staying in the atmosphere, but only about half of what we emit is staying in the atmosphere. The main focus of the OCO-2 is to detect where the ‘sinks’ are located."  Dr. Frankenberg and his team are determined to find the "sink" that is either on the ocean or in the land that takes up some of the extra CO2 we emit. However, mankind and its revolutionized ways emit more than what the plants may be able to take, in a not-so-distant future. Dr. Frankenberg explains,  "Mankind is emitting about 36 billion metric tons of CO2 each year into the atmosphere; this is what caused the atmospheric CO2 levels to rise since the Industrial Revolution!" What’s more, we certainly cannot rely on the fact that Nature is doing us a favor by taking up almost half of the carbon dioxide we emit because with that comes the big uncertainty of whether that will persist in the future, keeping in mind that we do not yet know how the carbon cycle will react to global warming.