ABoVE

ABoVE video and visualization || Methane emission hotspots were remotely observed at fine spatial resolution by NASA’s Next Generation Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS-NG for short) across broad regions of the North American Arctic as part of the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE).Hotspots in the Mackenzie Delta, NWT, CAIn the Mackenzie Delta of the Northwest Territories of Canada, 30 overlapping AVIRIS-NG survey swaths allow us to investigate the spatial patterns and environmental regulators of methane hotspots from individual pixels on the site-level to millions of pixels on the regional scale. This approach drastically improves our ability to scale the complex nature of methane emissions across heterogeneous and climate sensitive Arctic landscapes. Big Trail Lake, AK, USAAt Big Trail Lake, researchers had the opportunity to intensively study individual hotspots using 19 repeated AVIRIS-NG overflights and coordinated ground-based methane flux verification. From the ground, researchers confirmed concentrated and extreme methane emissions from the remotely identified hotspots. Fluxes in excess of 20 grams of per m2 per day emanated from zones of rapidly thawing permafrost on the margins of this pond. This mechanistic link between rapid permafrost thaw and methane hotspot generation provides the process-level context for interpreting hotspot patterns across the diverse and changing Arctic environments.Background imagery SourcesEsri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User CommunityAerial Photo credit: Hailey WebbScientific PublicationsElder, C.D., Thompson, D.R., Thorpe, A.K., Chandanpurkar, H.A., Hanke, P.J., Hasson, N., James, S.R., Minsley, B.J., Pastick, N.J., Olefeldt, D. and Walter Anthony, K.M., 2021. Characterizing methane emission hotspots from thawing permafrost. Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 35(12), p.e2020GB006922.Elder, C., N. Hasson, P. Hanke, S. Wright, K.W. Anthony, and C.E. Miller. 2021. Methane Fluxes from Shorelines and Differing Surfaces, Big Trail Lake, Alaska, 2019. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1870Baskaran, L.M., Elder, C.M., Bloom, A.A., Shuang, M., Thompson, D.R., and Miller, C.E. 2022. Geomorphological Patterns of Remotely Sensed Methane Hot Spots in the Mackenzie Delta, Canada. Environmental Research Letters, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac41fb. ||

The Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, or ABoVE, is a NASA-led, 10-year field experiment designed to better understand the ecological and social consequences of environmental change in one of the most rapidly changing regions on Earth. Satellite, airborne, and ground observations across Alaska and Canada will help us better understand the local and regional effects of changing forests, permafrost, and ecosystems – and how these changes could ultimately affect people and places beyond the Arctic. These videos were filmed during the summer 2022 field campaign in Fairbanks, Alaska. ||

Universal Production Music: Home To You by William Baxter Noon [PRS], Pluck Up Courage by John Griggs [PRS], Philip Michael Guyler [PRS], Wafer Thin by Adam Leslie Gock [APRA], Dinesh David Wicks [APRA], Mitchell Stewart [APRA], The Magpie's Pie by Quentin Bachelet [SACEM], Romain Sanson [SACEM], Ticking Tension by Quentin Bachelet [SACEM], Romain Sanson [SACEM], Reward Drawer by Ehren Ebbage [BMI] Additional images courtesy of Alaska Satellite Facility - University of Alaska FairbanksThis video can be freely shared and downloaded. While the video in its entirety can be shared without permission, some individual imagery provided by ASF is obtained through permission and may not be excised or remixed in other products. For more information on NASA’s media guidelines, visit https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.htmlComplete transcript available. ||

The Arctic Boreal and Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) covers 2.5 million square miles of tundra, forests, permafrost and lakes in Alaska and Northwestern Canada. ABoVE scientists are using satellites and aircraft to study this formidable terrain as it changes in a warming climate. Remote sensing by itself is not enough to understand the whole picture, so teams of researchers will go out into the field to gather data. With support from NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology Program, ABoVE researchers investigate questions about the role of climate in wildfires, thawing permafrost, wildlife migration habits, insect outbreaks and more. ||

Universal Production Music: Home To You by William Baxter Noon [PRS], Pluck Up Courage by John Griggs [PRS], Philip Michael Guyler [PRS], Wafer Thin by Adam Leslie Gock [APRA], Dinesh David Wicks [APRA], Mitchell Stewart [APRA], The Magpie's Pie by Quentin Bachelet [SACEM], Romain Sanson [SACEM], Ticking Tension by Quentin Bachelet [SACEM], Romain Sanson [SACEM], Reward Drawer by Ehren Ebbage [BMI] Additional images courtesy of Alaska Satellite Facility - University of Alaska FairbanksThis video can be freely shared and downloaded. While the video in its entirety can be shared without permission, some individual imagery provided by ASF is obtained through permission and may not be excised or remixed in other products. For more information on NASA’s media guidelines, visit https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.htmlComplete transcript available. ||

Music: Stepping Stone Bridge by Timothy Michael Hammond [PRS], Wayne Roberts [PRS]Watching Ladybirds by Benjamin James Parsons [PRS] This video can be freely shared and downloaded. While the video in its entirety can be shared without permission, some individual imagery provided by pond5.com and Artbeats is obtained through permission and may not be excised or remixed in other products. Specific details on stock footage may be found here. For more information on NASA’s media guidelines, visit https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html. Complete transcript available. ||

Scientists with NASA's Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment - ABoVE - are studying how the Arctic region responds to climate change. Looking at everything from thawing permafrost underground to wildfires, the researchers are working to create a comprehensive picture of the warming Arctic.This summer, the team brought a fleet of planes to fly over Alaska and Canada and gather data to complement measurements taken from the ground. The ABoVE campaign is designed to last for ten years. || Music: Wondrous Lands by Anthony Giordan [SACEM] ||

High above Alaska and Canada, researchers from NASA’s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) are studying carbon emissions from a DC-8 plane. The plane carries new lidar instruments to measure concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane in the air, far below the aircraft. The plane also carries instruments that can measure carbon concentrations with extreme accuracy, but only from up-close.To check the accuracy of the lidar measurements, the team needs to fly the plane down to the lower altitudes the lidar is studying. Taking measurements at every altitude is no easy feat. The plane flies in looping spirals down to just about 100 feet above the ground, and then spirals back up to about 30,000 feet, taking measurements the whole time. ||

Music: Suspended Beauty by Laurent Dury [SACEM]Complete transcript available. || In the Arctic, different effects of the warming climate can combine to create big changes to the landscape. Although wildfires are a normal part of life in the forest regions of the far north, they’re becoming more common, burning larger swaths of land more frequently.This is partly due to different weather patterns. Many wildfires are the result of lightning strikes, and as lightning in the area becomes more common, so do fires.Scientists with NASA’s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) are investigating how native vegetation responds to this more frequent burning, looking at places where spruce trees have burned and been replaced by deciduous plants like willow and birch.The effects of the changing plant life aren’t clear yet, and researchers are trying to understand how these plants will fare in the warming Arctic. ||

Last week, NASA's DC-8 plane flew over Alaska and Canada, measuring carbon dioxide and methane in the Arctic air. The plane carried five instruments to make these measurements for the Active Sensing of Carbon dioxide Emissions over Nights, Days and Seasons (ASCENDS) experiment.All part of NASA's Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE), the science team is studying how the Arctic is changing in a warming climate. || Music: Ellipsis by Ben Niblett [PRS], Jon Cotton [PRS]Complete transcript available. ||

Animal movement tracking across the arctic on top of seasonal natural phenomena like changing vegetation, snow (white), and sea ice (light purple).This video is also available on our YouTube channel. || The Arctic Animal Movement Archive (AAMA) is a new and growing collection of studies describing movements of animals in and near the Arctic. The AAMA includes millions of locations of thousands of animals over more than three decades, recorded by hundreds of scientists and institutions. By compiling these data, the AAMA supports public data discovery, preserves fundamental baseline data for the future, and facilitates efficient, collaborative data analysis. We have used the AAMA to document climatic influences on the migration phenology of golden eagles, geographic differences in the adaptive response of caribou reproductive phenology to climate change, species-specific changes in terrestrial mammal movement rates in response to increasing temperature, and the utility of animal-borne sensors as proxies for ambient air temperature. The AAMA is a living archive that can be used to uncover other such changes, investigate their causes and consequences, and recognize larger ecosystem changes taking place in the Arctic. These visualizations show AAMA animal location data. Some of the visualizations collpase the years down as if all of the data were from the same year; others show the data with the years passing. Several different groupings of animals are shown: marine mammals, raptors, seabirds, shorebirds, terrestrial mammals, and waterbirds. Snow and sea ice are also shown for context as they correlate to animal movements.Citation: Ecological insights from three decades of animal movement tracking across a changing Arctic. S.C. Davidson, et al. Science 06 Nov 2020: Vol. 370, Issue 6517, pp. 712-715 DOI: 10.1126/science.abb7080Data citation: The Arctic Animal Movement Archive (AAMA) is a collection of studies that contain animal movement and other animal-borne sensor data from the Arctic and Subarctic, owned by hundreds of participating experts and organizations. As of November 2020, this collection includes 214 studies that contain over 43 million locations of over 12,000 animals recorded from 1988 to the present. Initial development of the AAMA was funded by NASA's Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment. The AAMA is hosted on Movebank, a free, global research platform for animal movement and animal-borne sensor data. Long-term support for the storage and curation of the AAMA in Movebank comes from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. Visit the archive to learn more and find out how to participate. NASA Media: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/arctic-animals-movement-patterns-are-shifting-in-different-ways-as-the-climate-changesAGU iPoster: https://agu2020fallmeeting-agu.ipostersessions.com/Default.aspx?s=1C-9F-40-11-B3-77-C2-50-6F-F3-B1-3B-60-B4-93-5E#AGU Hyperwall Talk: [placeholder] ||

This image shows the core region (red outline) and extended region (purple outline) of the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment over a background of the NDVI trend from 1983-2012. || Climate change in the Arctic and Boreal region is unfolding faster than anywhere else on Earth, resulting in reduced Arctic sea ice, thawing of permafrost soils, decomposition of long- frozen organic matter, widespread changes to lakes, rivers, coastlines, and alterations of ecosystem structure and function. NASA's Terrestrial Ecology Program is conducting a major field campaign, the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE), in Alaska and western Canada, for 8 to 10 years, starting in 2015. ABoVE seeks a better understanding of the vulnerability and resilience of ecosystems and society to this changing environment. The image shown here outlines the core region of the study domain in red and the extended region of the study domain in purple.ABoVE’s science objectives are broadly focused on (1) gaining a better understanding of the vulnerability and resilience of Arctic and boreal ecosystems to environmental change in western North America, and (2) providing the scientific basis for informed decision-making to guide societal responses at local to international levels. Research for ABoVE will link field-based, process-level studies with geospatial data products derived from airborne and satellite sensors, providing a foundation for improving the analysis, and modeling capabilities needed to understand and predict ecosystem responses and societal implications.The background shown over the study region is a spatially complete view of the vegetation greenness change for all of Canada and Alaska obtained by calculating per-pixel NDVI trend from all available 1984–2012 peak-summer Landsat-5 and -7 surface reflectance data, establishing the mid-Summer greenness trend. More information on this NDVI trend can be found here. ||

This first 3D volumetric visualization focuses on several continents showing the emission and transport of atmospheric methane around the globe between January 1, 2017 and November 30, 2018. This video is also available on our YouTube channel. || Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that traps heat 28 times more effectively than carbon dioxide over a 100-year timescale. Concentrations of methane have increased by more than 150% since industrial activities and intensive agriculture began. After carbon dioxide, methane is responsible for about 20% of climate change in the twentieth century. Methane is produced under conditions where little to no oxygen is available. About 30% of methane emissions are produced by wetlands, including ponds, lakes and rivers. Another 20% is produced by agriculture, due to a combination of livestock, waste management and rice cultivation. Activities related to oil, gas, and coal extraction release an additional 30%. The remainder of methane emissions come from minor sources such as wildfire, biomass burning, permafrost, termites, dams, and the ocean. Scientists around the world are working to better understand the budget of methane with the ultimate goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving prediction of environmental change. For additional information, see the Global Methane Budget.The NASA SVS visualization presented here shows the complex patterns of methane emissions produced around the globe and throughout the year from the different sources described above. The visualization was created using output from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, GMAO, GEOS modeling system, developed and maintained by scientists at NASA. Wetland emissions were estimated by the LPJ-wsl model, which simulates the temperature and moisture dependent methane emission processes using a variety of satellite data to determine what parts of the globe are covered by wetlands. Other methane emission sources come from inventories of human activity. The height of Earth’s atmosphere and topography have been vertically exaggerated and appear approximately 50-times higher than normal in order to show the complexity of the atmospheric flow. As the visualization progresses, outflow from different source regions is highlighted. For example, high methane concentrations over South America are driven by wetland emissions while over Asia, emissions reflect a mix of agricultural and industrial activities. Emissions are transported through the atmosphere as weather systems move and mix methane around the globe. In the atmosphere, methane is eventually removed by reactive gases that convert it to carbon dioxide. Understanding the three-dimensional distribution of methane is important for NASA scientists planning observations that sample the atmosphere in very different ways. Satellites like GeoCarb, a planned geostationary mission to observe both carbon dioxide and methane, look down from space and will estimate the total number of methane molecules in a column of air. Aircraft, like those launched during NASA’s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABOVE) sample the atmosphere along very specific flight lines, providing additional details about the processes controlling methane emissions at high latitudes. Atmospheric models help place these different types of measurements in context so that scientists can refine estimates of sources and sinks, understand the processes controlling them and reduce uncertainty in future projections of carbon-climate feedbacks. ||