The Biomass mission will use a long-forbidden part of the radio spectrum to see how much carbon forests capture.
These indirect systems rely on a combination of field sampling—foresters roaming among the trees to measure their height and diameter—and remote sensing technologies like lidar scanners, which can be flown over the forests on airplanes or drones and used to measure treetop height along lines of flight. This approach has worked well in North America and Europe, which have well-established forest management systems in place. "People know every tree there, take lots of measurements," Scipal says. But most of the world's trees are in less-mapped places, like the Amazon jungle, where less than 20% of the forest has been studied in depth on the ground. To get a sense of the biomass in those remote, mostly inaccessible areas, space-based forest sensing is the only feasible option. The problem is, the satellites we currently have in orbit are not equipped for monitoring trees. Tropical forests seen from space look like green plush carpets, because all we can see are the treetops; from imagery like this,…