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NRT Carbon Budget
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Welcome to Near Real-time Carbon Budget Project

A WAKE UP CALL TO THE CARBON BUDGET? OUR SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATION


It is crucial to monitor how human caused CO2 emissions change with time and how the land and ocean carbon sinks help us mitigating climate warming by capturing CO2. The current assessment provides an update of the budget one year ago. Here we accelerate the time and provide each quarter a synthesis of emissions and natural CO2 sinks based on the latest atmospheric data and a suite of peer-reviewed modeling approaches .

Two independent and complementary approaches are used to estimate the global CO2 budget and the regional distribution of emissions and natural CO2 sinks. The two approaches are very consistent globally and they show similar anomalies at the regional level, but we see more contrasted flux anomalies in the inversion.


Top-down carbon budget is based on satellite observations of atmospheric column averaged CO2 concentration with global coverage by the OCO2 satellite of NASA using an atmospheric inversion model to translate these observations into weekly maps of CO2 fluxes over land and oceans. The inversion model uses as input fossil CO2 emissions and the latest wind fields for the year considered.
OCO2 Satellite Data
Fossil Emissions Estimates
Atmospheric Inversion Model
Land Sink
Ocean Sink
Atmospheric CO₂ Growth Rate from OCO-2 data
Bottom-up carbon budget is based on near real time fossil CO2 emissions based on activity data from Carbon Monitor, atmospheric CO2 monthly data from the NOAA and SCRIPPS network , process-based land carbon models integrated with the latest climate data as input, and AI-empowered emulators of land and ocean carbon models. Those land and ocean carbon models are contributing to in the annual Global Budget assessment and have been extensively validated.
Fossil Emissions Estimates
Land Models
Land AI models (emulators)
Ocean AI models (emulators)
Land Sink
Ocean Sink
Atmospheric CO₂ Growth Rate from NOAA and SCRIPPS stations
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Budget Imbalance

Global Carbon Budget

Here we see the global growth rate of atmospheric CO2 seen from surface marine stations from NOAA and from the Mauna Loa observatory from NOAA and SCRIPPS, the longest atmospheric record. The year 2003 shows a record high growth rate at Mauna Loa and a very high growth rate at the marine stations.

Here we see the global budget, showing the fate of carbon from fossil CO2 emissions which stays in the atmosphere and makes the atmospheric growth rate (blue), or is absorbed by the land (green) or the ocean reservoirs (blue-green). The bottom up budget is the large bar. The top-down inversion budget is he inside bar.

Land Carbon Regional Fluxes

The 2003 anomaly from the low latency Dynamic vegetation models is shown in red. The color bars show the range and density of the 15 Dynamic vegetation models used by the Global Carbon Project up to 2022 (darker green colors mean more models predict this value). Red bars are the median from the 15 models of the Global Carbon Project. Black dots show the average of the 3 models used for low latency estimates.

Land Models - Global
Atmospheric Inversion - Global

Ocean Carbon Regional Fluxes

The 2003 anomaly. Red bars are the median from the 15 models of the Global Carbon Project. Black dots show the average of the 3 models used for low latency estimates.

Ocean AI Models - global
Atmospheric Inversion - global