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Does anyone here know how accurately current sensor technology could map O2 output on a satellite? I.e. could we get down to, say, 10 meter precision? Here's w

Does anyone here know how accurately current sensor technology could map O2 output on a satellite? I.e. could we get down to, say, 10 meter precision? Here's what I was thinking: Take the current approach with the Carbon certificate and decentralise it using blockchain technology (e.g. Ethereum) hooked up to (to be made) publicly available sensor data on O2, as well as a public data on land ownership; Give every patch of land globally a wallet address. Make an App and API for the payment process, based on liters of gasoline / oil bought / electricity used for a certain area / KM of flight taken (convert to Mols of CO2 assuming a perfect flame). Distribute the payments evenly among O2 wallet addresses. For unclaimed land and international waters, make a fund that can be distributed among national governments, e.g. by how much unclaimed land and coastline they have. At first the payments are completely optional, made by users that want to become carbon neutral. However, businesses and governments can choose to use this system to easily implement mandatory carbon neutrality without the need to trust a third party. Blockchain powered Dapps allow just this - having code running on a network that everyone can audit, but no-one can change.

falsedan 9y ago
Atmospheric sensors have to be deployed at the location they're sampling, so step 0 is: cover the earth with air quality monitoring stations. Step -1 is convincing someone to pay for this (governments have limited funding for this, so choose their monitoring sites carefully & extrapolate from the recorded data). There's a few sites which aggregate the public datasources, like http://aqicn.org/map/world/ http://aqicn.org/map/world/
- m_mueller 9y ago
  Isn't there a more scalable solution? I'm imagining reflective stripes at specifiv GPS positions, so satellites can target them with lasers and measure the reflection. Too much refraction?
  - falsedan 9y ago
    The refraction doesn't matter, its the precision. Given a reading (of 02 ppm), how can you prove that it matches the reading a ground station would have made? How could you filter out the noise from materials in the ~100km of atmosphere between the satellites and the targets? More pragmatically, could you explain it in a courtroom & convince the jury that it works? I understand that you're disappointed that this extremely useful idea doesn't have a simple solution.
    - m_mueller 9y ago
      Nah, I'm not disappointed, just trying to understand the limits of current sensors. I also don't think it needs to be extremely accurate - maybe there's even proxies that could be used, like the shade of green on cloudless days for land coordinates, however this opens up a lot of abusive avenues of course. Btw. how about something like OCO-2? I couldn't find anything about its spatial resolution, but it seems to allow ground measurements of carbon sinks and sources. https://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/science/MeasurementApproach/ https://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/science/MeasurementApproach/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory_2
      - falsedan 9y ago
        Its spacial resolution is on the linked page: > OCO-2 records how much sunlight is reflected off the CO 2 molecules in an air column. OCO-2 makes measurements in three different spectral bands over four to eight different footprints of approximately 1.29 km × 2.25 km (0.80 mi × 1.40 mi) each. It's air columns, so again you would have a hard time proving that the source of the detected pollutants came from the area & excluding the case that they drifted into the area at a higher altitude.

falsedan 9y ago

Atmospheric sensors have to be deployed at the location they're sampling, so step 0 is: cover the earth with air quality monitoring stations. Step -1 is convincing someone to pay for this (governments have limited funding for this, so choose their monitoring sites carefully & extrapolate from the recorded data). There's a few sites which aggregate the public datasources, like http://aqicn.org/map/world/ http://aqicn.org/map/world/

m_mueller 9y ago
Isn't there a more scalable solution? I'm imagining reflective stripes at specifiv GPS positions, so satellites can target them with lasers and measure the reflection. Too much refraction?
- falsedan 9y ago
  The refraction doesn't matter, its the precision. Given a reading (of 02 ppm), how can you prove that it matches the reading a ground station would have made? How could you filter out the noise from materials in the ~100km of atmosphere between the satellites and the targets? More pragmatically, could you explain it in a courtroom & convince the jury that it works? I understand that you're disappointed that this extremely useful idea doesn't have a simple solution.
  - m_mueller 9y ago
    Nah, I'm not disappointed, just trying to understand the limits of current sensors. I also don't think it needs to be extremely accurate - maybe there's even proxies that could be used, like the shade of green on cloudless days for land coordinates, however this opens up a lot of abusive avenues of course. Btw. how about something like OCO-2? I couldn't find anything about its spatial resolution, but it seems to allow ground measurements of carbon sinks and sources. https://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/science/MeasurementApproach/ https://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/science/MeasurementApproach/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory_2
    - falsedan 9y ago
      Its spacial resolution is on the linked page: > OCO-2 records how much sunlight is reflected off the CO 2 molecules in an air column. OCO-2 makes measurements in three different spectral bands over four to eight different footprints of approximately 1.29 km × 2.25 km (0.80 mi × 1.40 mi) each. It's air columns, so again you would have a hard time proving that the source of the detected pollutants came from the area & excluding the case that they drifted into the area at a higher altitude.