Hello Alex Vermeulen! What is the Carbon Portal?

– The ICOS Carbon Portal is the central data store of ICOS. ICOS is the Greenhouse Gas observation network for Europe, that measures concentrations and exchange fluxes of greenhouse gases from more than 100 stations all over Europe. The Carbon Portal collects all the processed data and distributes it to the users. The users will mainly be other scientists, but together with them we will also produce for example maps and products that are of interest for policy makers, the general public and for example students.

Why is this important?

– As you know climate change is happening and humans are to blame. Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are increasing rapidly due to our emissions from burning fossil fuels, agriculture and disturbing natural landscapes. This has led to some global warming already, especially in the arctic regions and with the historic emissions we have already committed to a global average temperature increase of almost 2 degrees, even if we would stop all emissions today. There are even risks that this inevitable climate change will enforce itself due to for example a sharp decrease in arctic summer ice cover and thawing of permafrost regions. If we want to limit this we need to take action on reducing our emissions and also be able to detect these possible future changes, because we need to take that into account as well. Until now we have been “saved” from big changes due to inertia of the ocean, that take up 90% of the warming, and because land surface ecosystems and the ocean take up more than half of our emissions of carbon dioxide, but this might change as the oceans become increasingly acid (due to the uptake) and the land ecosystems respond to climate change.

Of what use is the Carbon Portal to the general public, and to students and researchers?

– Through the Carbon Portal website we will also distribute data and results that students can use in their work, to prepare a lecture at school, to prepare or add information to a master thesis, or that will help to generate their interest to start a PhD in this interesting and very relevant field of science. For the general public our information will show how complicated and in fact fragile the Earth System is, which will hopefully create the awareness and willingness that we need to do something about our emissions. In the long run our data will show how effective our emission reduction strategies are and which countries and sectors are complying  or not with respect to the (future) climate treaties. Hopefully the nations will start to work on that at the next UN summit on Climate Change (COP21) in Paris, December this year.

Is the Carbon Portal available now?

– Yes, the Carbon Portal has a website (www.icos-cp.eu) and is delivering services to the project internally, like a document management system and serving web sites. Behind the screens we are setting up the databases and web services. As soon as ICOS has got the legal status (foreseen for autumn 2015) and the official ICOS data is coming in, the Carbon Portal will provide this. We also already serve some example modelled data of so called elaborated products (like maps and trends of emissions) based on pre-ICOS data and inverse modelling systems.