Regional Initiatives - NACP
North American Carbon Program (NACP)
The central objective of the North American Carbon Program is to measure and understand carbon stocks and the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and carbon monoxide (CO) in North America and in adjacent ocean regions. The NACP addresses several basic questions:
- What is the carbon balance of North America and adjacent ocean basins, and how is the balance changing over time? What are the sources and sinks, and the geographic patterns of carbon fluxes?
- What factors control the sources and sinks, and how do they change with time?
- Are there potential “surprises”, where sources could increase or sinks disappear?
- How can we enhance and manage long-lived carbon sinks to sequester carbon?
There are two major program elements that related to the theme of land-use and land-cover changes. These are: 1) development of the infrastructure of long-term observations of the atmosphere, including exchange fluxes with vegetation and soils, and of the capability to measure net uptake or emissions from the land (forests, agriculture, urban and suburban areas, and wild lands) of North America, and 2) enhancement of forest, crop, wetland, and soil inventories, and process studies. The goal for NACP ecosystem measurements and models are to quantify, and reduce uncertainty in, spatial patterns and mechanisms accounting for changes in carbon stocks and methane release and uptake. The list of LCLUC-related NACP projects can be found at http://lcluc.hq.nasa.gov.
Additional information on the NACP can be found at: http://www.nacarbon.org/nacp and at http://www-radar.jpl.nasa.gov/carbon
Example NACP Project: LEDAPS - A North American Forest Disturbance Record from Landsat
Jeffrey G. Masek (Principal Investigator), Biospheric Sciences, NASA GSFC
Forest-cover conversion, disturbance, and recovery have been proposed as primary mechanisms for transferring carbon between the land surface and the atmosphere, but the area and timing of these processes is still poorly quantified. Our project (LEDAPS – Landsat Ecosystem Disturbance Adaptive Processing System) has been funded to “mine” the 33+ year Landsat observational record in order to assess forest disturbance across North America, in support of the USGCRP North American Carbon Program. Specifically, we have the following objectives:
- Create surface reflectance (SR) products for North America from the Landsat GeoCover archive, a global orthorectified dataset of Landsat imagery centered on 1975, 1990, and 2000 epochs.
- Generate decadal, wall-to-wall maps of North American forest disturbance (fire, harvest, insect damage), recovery, and conversion from these reflectance products.
- Develop automated approaches for processing and analyzing Landsat data that can be re-used across the remote sensing community.
- Work with representatives of the US Forest Service to assess the utility of Landsat reflectance and forest-cover change products for carbon and forest monitoring.
