Assessing The World's 1.5 Trillion Trees
- Editor OGN Daily
- May 4
- 2 min read
New space probe has launched in order to help scientists better understand the importance of rainforests in storing carbon and the impact of deforestation.
The world's rainforests are often referred to as the "lungs of the earth". They store billions of tonnes of carbon and in doing so help to reduce the impacts of climate change.
But with more than one and half trillion trees, measuring exactly how much carbon they store has been virtually impossible, until now.
On Tuesday, the European Space Agency (ESA) successfully launched a first-of-a-kind satellite - named Biomass - which uses a special radar system to reveal what lies beneath the canopy.
"We really want to interrogate these forests. We can actually look inside," Prof John Remedios, director of The National Centre for Earth Observation, which proposed the idea to ESA, said after the launch. He said that it would be a major achievement "to actually know for the first time with high accuracy how much is actually in the Amazon, Congo, Indonesia".
The 1.2-tonne satellite will use an approach not dissimilar to that used in a CT scan, and analyse slices through the trees on repeat passes to build up a picture of how much woody material is present. From this, scientists can assess the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide that the forests store.
The team is hoping to produce the first maps within six months, and will then continue to gather data for the next five years. These annual maps will not only show how much carbon is stored but how much is being lost through deforestation.
Apart from being able to peer through forest canopies, another advantage of the Biomass satellite is that it can penetrate clouds giving a consistent, comparable view of a forest from one year to the next.
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