The proposed work is relevant to the specific objectives of this NASA carbon monitoring system solicitation, including rigorous exploitation of NASA and international partner satellite remote…

This federal contract award is a $145,803.25 grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to Earth Big Data LLC, a for-profit limited liability company. The grant supports research and development to advance capabilities for environmental monitoring and modeling using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and other earth observation data sources.

The work is relevant to NASA's Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) program, which aims to develop rigorous methods for exploiting satellite remote sensing data to monitor greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) framework. Earth Big Data LLC has prior experience supporting federal agencies like NOAA and NASA in processing and analyzing SAR data, including a recent NOAA contract to integrate satellite flood mapping products. This NASA grant will fund the company's research to develop methods for ecosystem disturbance monitoring using data from upcoming SAR missions like NISAR to support science validation and identify applications for forest monitoring.

The proposed work is relevant to the specific objectives of this NASA carbon monitoring system solicitation, including rigorous exploitation of NASA and international partner satellite remote sensing resources and computational capabilities. The subsidiary body of scientific and technological advice (sbsta) of the unfccc agreed in june 2013 that continuous improvement of data and methods is vital for developing MRV systems for redd+. In particular, sbsta identified the need to reduce uncertainties in emissions accounting and to develop methodologically consistent ways to harness new observational data, whether field or remote sensing, that can be used to report against reference levels of deforestation and forest degradation, as well as associated reference emission levels (sbsta, 2013). To develop methodologically consistent, transparent, yet flexible accounting methods, as required in the international framework of the unfccc, as well as numerous BI- and multi-lateral agreements, the group on earth observation (GEO) has established a forest carbon tracking task (geofct).