The Observatory of Natural Carbon fluxes (ONC) provides a pre-operational global accounting system, dealing with the impact of weather and climate variability on soil and vegetation carbon fluxes and stocks.
The UN Convention on Climate Change requires involved parties to deliver annual greenhouse gas inventories since 1990 onwards. Several Articles of the Kyoto Protocol concern land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) activities.
The service capitalises on existing tools and expertise of European meteorological services such as the integration of in situ and satellite observations by implementing and using data assimilation and cross validation techniques.
The service will improve the quantification of biological sinks/sources of carbon at the global scale:
- Modelling carbon fluxes and the associated / analysed, water flux, soil moisture, vegetation biomass, carbon stocks
- Mapping across spatial / temporal scales
- Evaluation / reduction of uncertainties.
