National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NASA's Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) is an initiative designed to make significant contributions to characterizing, quantifying, understanding, and predicting the evolution of global carbon sources, sinks, and fluxes. This forward-looking initiative works to improve monitoring of terrestrial and aquatic carbon stocks and fluxes. NASA's approach toward a carbon monitoring system has built upon the major strengths of its Earth Science program, emphasizing the exploitation of current and future satellite remote sensing resources, computational capabilities, scientific knowledge, airborne science capabilities, and end-to-end system expertise.

The CMS Science Team is comprised of representatives from individual interdisciplinary funded projects with separate but often connected research objectives. All CMS Principal Investigators (PIs) are automatically part of the Science Team and additional members must be formally identified in the proposal process or afterward by nomination to the Science Team Lead and NASA Headquarters. Team members interact to learn about best scientific practices, new methods, and available datasets, and work within the broader team structure to integrate and combine information.

The CMS Science Team is responsible for providing broad research community involvement in the development and evaluation of NASA CMS products; coordinating their NASA-funded CMS activities to ensure maximum science, management, and policy return; and providing scientific, technical, and policy-relevant inputs to help identify potential future research topics for NASA CMS activities.

Science Team Membership Process:
The CMS solicitation requires that proposals request CMS Science Team membership for one or more key investigators (see details here). Please forward those names to Support.

To nominate someone to the Science Team who was not specifically identified as a CMS Science Team member on your proposal, follow the directions on this page: How to request to add a Science Team Member after proposal selection.

Science Team Meeting:
The annual Science Team Meeting usually takes place in September each year, either on the East or West coast. Each project should be represented by the PI, a Science Team Member, a Stakeholder, and optionally an early career participant. Check your project profile to make sure everyone you want to attend is listed on the participants tab. And be on the lookout for a stakeholder survey that is very important to the planning of the meeting.

Monthly telecons:
Please expect to participate in our monthly telecons held on the last Friday of each month from 1:00-2:00PM Eastern. The telecons are held on Webex. The agenda and reminders are sent via email prior to the telecon.

Working Groups:
Science Team Members are expected to join and actively participate in one or more working groups. (See Working Group section below)

Project Profiles:
Each CMS project has a project profile, available on the Teams and Projects page. Project Profiles serve as a comprehensive resource for sharing project abstracts, participants, publications, and data products.

Attribution:
Doing excellent science and publishing with clear attribution to CMS funding is important for all CMS Science Team participants.

Below is an example of attribution to CMS funding provided by Hurtt et al (2022):

This work was supported by NASA Carbon Monitoring System Projects (80NSSC17K0710, 80NSSC21K1059, NNX14AO73G, 80NSSC17K0711, 80NSSC20K0006, 80NSSC21K0965 80HQTR21T0066, 80HQTR18T0016, NNX16AQ25G, 80NSSC21K1001). A portion of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004).

Your attribution statement should use your funding numbers.

The NASA Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Office (CCEO) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center provides support to our team. If you need assistance with the CMS website, submitting publications and datasets, enrolling in working groups, etc., please contact Support. The CCEO is led by Peter Griffith, Chief Support Scientist, with additional help from Libby Larson, Senior Support Scientist. Katharine Stover is the CMS Applications lead, working with stakeholders across all CMS projects. Valeria Morales is the assistant to the Science Team Leader and provides additional support.

CMS Working Groups are established to facilitate activities between related projects (e.g. discussions, intercomparisons, syntheses, etc.) relating to CMS goals.

• Science Team Members are expected to join and actively participate in one or more of the working groups.
• Other participants on currently funded CMS projects can participate in Working Group activities as appropriate and in support of the Science Team Member's role on those particular working groups. This includes other Co-Is, Postdocs, Graduate students, etc.
• CMS PIs can propose new working groups if they can identify two additional PIs who are interested in participating. Requests to create new working groups should be sent to the CMS Science Team Lead, George Hurtt.

How to Join a Working Group?

• Science Team Members wishing to become a member of a Working Group should send an email requesting membership to the Working Group Lead and cc George Hurtt, Valeria Morales, and the project PI.
• Science Team Members wishing to have other participants from their currently funded CMS projects participate in a Working Group on which they are members, should send an email to the Working Group Lead and cc George Hurtt, Valeria Morales, and the project PI. These requests should include the nominee's CV and brief description of their potential contribution.
• Following review by the Working Group Lead and Science Team Lead, nominees will be added to Working Groups.

Additional information on current working groups can be found here: https://carbon.nasa.gov/wg_cms.html

Initiated in 2010, a congressional appropriation directed NASA to initiate work towards a carbon monitoring system (CMS) and provided specific guidance. The approach NASA developed in following these directions emphasized exploitation of the satellite remote sensing resources, scientific knowledge, and end-to-end system expertise that are major strengths of the NASA Earth Science program. The CMS project has had three phases, as described below:

In Phase 1 (2010–2012), NASA's CMS activities were directed through NASA centers and involved biomass and flux pilot studies, a scoping effort on quantifying ocean carbon, and one on policy and decision making needs, as well as over a dozen science definition team projects (Hurtt et al 2014).

• Report: Hurtt G et al (2014) NASA Carbon Monitoring System: Phase 1 Report (NASA) pp 1–78.

In Phase 2 (2011–2016), consistent with Congressional direction, NASA solicited new projects which were competitively selected to build upon the efforts of Phase 1, with a large expansion in prototyping activities across a diversity of systems, scales, and regions, including research focused on prototype monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems for specific carbon management projects. In 2013, studies were added to advance MRV-relevant studies and in 2015 and 2016, project selections continued to advance biomass mapping efforts, flux quantification, and blue carbon mapping. The work was conducted to improve the characterization of errors and uncertainties in existing products and to engage stakeholders, identify their needs, and seek inputs on the value of CMS prototype products (Hurtt et al 2022).

• Report: Hurtt G et al (2022) The NASA Carbon Monitoring System Phase 2 Synthesis: scope, findings, gaps and recommended next steps. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ac7407

In Phase 3 (2017–present), significant emphasis on ocean and coastal projects have increased the participation of wet carbon projects in the prototyping efforts, as well as extension or expansion of prototyping projects to larger scales or to new variables.