About Us

NASA’s mission is to provide the observations and foundational science that underpins our understanding of Earth as a system. This is essential in the context of greenhouse gasses and climate change because the processes that drive climate change depend not only on human influences such as greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions, but also how the land biosphere and ocean respond to and absorb these emissions.

Through its Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), NASA supports prototyping of new data capabilities and product-oriented overlays to our existing programs that aid in the monitoring, reporting, and verification of carbon stocks and fluxes. CMS is an Earth system science approach that combines observations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere with measurements of the biological processes responsible for surface emission and uptake, or absorption, of carbon dioxide. CMS looks at land and water along with critical markers of the transformation of vegetation like evapotranspiration and solar-induced fluorescence. By producing top-down and bottom-up greenhouse gas emissions estimates and comparing them, CMS can point towards what we are missing.