Atmospheric Carbon and Transport (ACT) - America: A multi-year airborne mission to study fluxes and transport of CO2 and CH4 across the eastern United States

The Atmospheric Carbon and Transport (ACT) - America mission is a NASA Earth Venture Suborbital mission that aims to improve our understanding of transport and fluxes of greenhouse gases (GHGs), and thus improve the accuracy and precision of regional inverse flux estimates of GHGs. ACT-America has conducted four field campaigns with two aircraft across three regions of the eastern United States spanning all four seasons. Simulations of atmospheric GHGs have been conducted for a subset of these field campaigns. The mission is built around three objectives: 1) quantifying and reducing uncertainties in simulated atmospheric transport of GHGs; 2) quantifying and reducing uncertainties in estimates of CH4 emissions and biogenic CO2 fluxes; and 3) evaluating the ability of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory – 2 (OCO-2) to observe spatial variations in tropospheric CO2. Results to date include spatially-extensive, highly-resolved observations of the three-dimensional structure of GHGs across a