The U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center: Extending Accessible and Integrated GHG Information from U.S. Government and Non-Public Sources to meet user needs

Abstract

The newly established United States Greenhouse Gas Center (U.S. GHG Center) is a multi-agency partnership between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that aims to accelerate the production and delivery of actionable, trusted greenhouse gas (GHG) information from the federal government and non-public sector to a variety of users through a coordinated data system, reflecting transparency and open source science principles in both data and methods. The US GHG Center acts as an enabler of collaboration with networks of interagency, international, intergovernmental and private sector partners to increase confidence in setting, assessing, and meeting climate change mitigation goals, with a preliminary focus on carbon dioxide and methane. The US GHG Center is also a critical element in the implementation of the “National Strategy to Advance an Integrated US Greenhouse Gas Measurement, Monitoring, and Information System”.  Initial focus areas include 1) Gridded anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, 2) Natural sources and sinks, and 3) New Observations for tracking large emission events. The US GHG Center web portal includes a prototype data catalogue, exploratory data analysis capabilities, a collaborative science environment for data analysis and exploration, as well as an interactive visual interface for storytelling. Examples of products currently available on the GHG Center portal include methane and carbon dioxide concentration anomalies and emissions from airborne and space-based instruments, including from NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) imaging spectrometer in orbit on the International Space Station, EPA’s gridded U.S. anthropogenic methane greenhouse gas inventory data, gridding methodologies and visualizations, NOAA’s Observation Package (ObsPack) data products that bring together atmospheric greenhouse gas observations from a variety of sampling platforms, as well as multi-model land flux and ecosystem exchange estimates.