A three year $660K program is proposed to develop and evaluate ocean color satellite-based primary production models for estimating carbon fixation of freshwater lakes on a global scale and to provide…

This is a $660,000 grant award to Michigan Technological University (Michigan Tech) by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to develop and evaluate ocean color satellite-based models for estimating carbon fixation in freshwater lakes worldwide. The three-year program will generate the first global dataset of freshwater lake carbon fixation, which supports NASA's Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) research objectives. The project builds upon previous NASA-funded work by Michigan Tech and will produce prototype monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) tools and datasets for future NASA missions. The grant does not have a set-aside designation. The results will provide insights into how factors like climate change and invasive species affect the carbon budgets of freshwater ecosystems globally.

A three year $660K program is proposed to develop and evaluate ocean color satellite-based primary production models for estimating carbon fixation of freshwater lakes on a global scale and to provide carbon fixation estimates for the world s freshwater lakes. Generation of this first of its kind data set is an important initial step to determining complete freshwater lake carbon budgets for the world s lakes. These new remote sensing based tools and data products generated at local and regional scales would support the monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) aspect of NASA s CMS program objectives and specifically addresses the two CMS research topics using remote sensing data products to produce and evaluate prototype MRV system approaches and/or calibration and validation data sets for future NASA missions; and studies that build upon, extend, and/or improve the existing CMS products for biomass and flux resulting from NASA s first phases of CMS pilot studies . This project builds upon and extends a methodology for estimating primary production established in an initial pilot study under a NASA CMS phase 2 (2012 solicitation) program to develop new regional carbon monitoring products in the great lakes (shuchman ET AL. 2013; fahnenstiel ET AL. 2016; grant #NN12AP94G). Specifically, a simplified depth integrated model (DIM) for estimating primary production or carbon fixation (thereafter referred to as carbon fixation) would generate a 2011 snapshot of the total carbon fixation in all freshwater lakes on a 300M grid, while a more sophisticated regionally optimized vertically generalized production model (vgpm) developed under this program would be used to generate annual carbon fixation estimates for 1000 freshwater lakes of the world from 2002-2011. Finally, monthly estimates of carbon fixation would be generated for 10 of the world s largest lakes from 2002-2016. In addition to supporting CMS, the time series of carbon fixation products to be generated under this new program can be used to provide a better understanding of how anthropogenic forcing, invasive species, and climate change affect carbon fixation of the freshwater lakes in the various ecological regions throughout the globe. The carbon fixation estimates to be generated under this program are also useful in calculating freshwater fish production and better understanding lake ecosystems throughout the world. The globolakes research programme (http://WWW.globolakes.AC.UK/) is an integral part of this research program and our goals fit closely with their research mission. Globolakes is providing a robust database of satellite and in situ observations that will be directly used in the generation of freshwater carbon fixation products. The simplified DIM and vgpm developed under this proposed program can utilize a variety of multispectral satellite aircraft and UAS data sources. The ocean color satellite data that will be used in this proposed program includes: meris and viirs.