An open access platform is being developed within the scope of the Research Center for Innovation in Greenhouse Gases (RCGI), based at the University of São Paulo (USP). With a wide range of data on greenhouse gas emissions in the Amazon, the platform will add variables that control the carbon cycle, in addition to enabling analysis and helping to study the region’s role in the global climate.
The project coordinator, scientist Paulo Artaxo, informed that the tool should be ready in up to three years. However, by the end of this year, he predicts that the first data will be available and that it will be possible to follow them. Artaxo is a professor at the Institute of Physics at USP and one of the main researchers at the RCGI.
“The strong point of the platform is that it is freely accessible to anyone, it can be used as a tool for the governments of all nine countries in the Amazon basin to structure public policies, for example to reduce deforestation in the region. Brazil has an international commitment to zero emissions in the Amazon in 2028 and the big question is: how is the government going to do that?” According to him, the system will provide a follow-up of this process.
Regarding the analyzes that can be carried out using the new system, he observes: “If the Amazon has already become a source of greenhouse gases for the atmosphere or if it is still absorbing carbon. That information we still don’t have.”
The tool is being built with advanced big data techniques in order to generate data that can be used to monitor gas emissions, better understand their causes and guide the creation and inspection of public policies aimed at mitigating emissions. According to the RCGI, it will make it possible to monitor Brazil’s international commitments to reduce deforestation and the emission of greenhouse gases by the Amazon ecosystem.
According to the scientist, two aspects that will be highlighted in these analyzes are the role of agricultural expansion and the impact of climate change on changes in the photosynthetic processes of the forest. “We observe that global warming and the change in precipitation in the Amazon are affecting the processes that regulate the absorption and emission of greenhouse gases, causing the forest to be starting to lose carbon to the atmosphere”, he said.
For Artaxo, this is worrying because the forest has about 120 billion tons of carbon in the ecosystem, which corresponds to ten years of burning all the fossil fuels in the world.
In order to structure viable, efficient and easy-to-apply public policies, the scientist says that having reliable data is essential. According to him, this database will provide more reliable data than what is currently available and should clarify the disparity in what is currently published on emissions in the Amazon.
“We have a whole component for validating this data, that is, we are going to take concrete measurements that we made on the ground in various regions of the Amazon and compare them with satellite data. With this, we are going to separate the satellites that make good quality measurements over the Amazon and others where the algorithms are not that precise”, he explained.
With this system, important analyzes can be carried out, such as the role of forest degradation in emissions, the impact of El Niño and La Niña on the emission of greenhouse gases, the calculation of methane emissions in flooded areas, among others.
unified platform
According to the RCGI, this is the first platform to bring, in a unified way, most of the parameters that control the process of absorption and emission of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. Artaxo says that this initiative will be crucial for Brazil to adopt public policies backed by science, with comprehensive and reliable data.
“We will also be able to analyze the current state of emissions in almost real time, and make projections, using artificial intelligence and advanced machine learning techniques”, says the scientist.
The coordinator of the computational part of the project, José Reinaldo Silva, a professor at Poli-USP, recalls that “big data techniques, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, will be used to process and analyze this gigantic mass of data, unraveling the complex relationships nonlinear across multiple parameters”.
According to him, the Amazon system is so complex and wide that it is necessary to develop advanced computational tools, allowing the understanding of the non-linear behavior of the forest’s interaction with the climate system and a more complete understanding of this system.
With a proposal for a comprehensive offer of data, the platform will allow access to data from satellites, measurements on towers, the Lidar system (Inpe) and meteorological data, covering the entire Amazon region in its nine countries. The scientist highlights that the tool is very diverse in terms of data, including atmospheric properties, soil and socioeconomic data, and that all of this will be continually updated.
“The platform will gather satellite images, atmospheric modeling results, measurements on the ground, so it is a gigantic database where we really hope to be able to aggregate all these variables that control the carbon cycle in the Amazon”, adds Artaxo.
The first phase, which is in progress, is to collect data from remote sensing, surface and modeling already done. After that, the researchers will start to integrate and link different databases and develop artificial intelligence tools that allow extracting qualified information from the system as a whole.
The platform is being developed within USP, as part of the project Emission of greenhouse gases in the Amazon and the RCGI data analysis system and services, which already has a team of nine postdoctoral fellows and many master’s and doctoral students. Funding comes from Shell and the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP).
The project has the support of entities such as the Instituto de Pesquisas Amazônia (Ipam), the Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazônia (Imazon) and MapBiomas, which provide geolocated data on gas emissions and deforestation in the region, in addition to to make it possible to feed back other databases. The National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), the National Institute for Research in the Amazon (Inpa), the Large-Scale Biosphere and Atmosphere Experiment in the Amazon (LBA), the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory (Atto), the Escola Politécnica and the USP Physics Institute are the project coordinators.