During El Niño, the tropics emit more carbon dioxide
The phenomenon creates warmer, drier conditions in some tropical regions that mimic future climate change
The tropics of Asia, Africa and South America all puffed out more carbon dioxide during the strong 2015–2016 El Niño than during the 2011 La Niña, new satellite data show. Because El Niño’s warmer, drier conditions in tropical regions mimic the effects of climate change expected by the end of the century, those observations may be a sobering harbinger of the tropics’ diminishing role as a buffer for fossil fuel emissions (SN Online: 9/28/17).
The new findings come from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, or OCO-2, which launched in 2014. Five papers in the Oct. 13 Science describe some of the first data collected by the satellite, which is giving scientists an unprecedented peek into how carbon moves between land, atmosphere and oceans.