Captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission on 25 July 2023, the image shows tropical forest in the state of Pará in Brazil.
Tropical forests are clearly critical to Earth’s climate system, but understanding exactly how much carbon they absorb from the atmosphere, store and release is tricky to calculate, not least because measuring and reporting methods vary. The research, published recently in the Carbon Balance and Management journal, describes why there can be a gap between carbon flux estimates based on data from Earth observing satellites and country estimates given in National Greenhouse Gas Inventories.
