The LIDAR technology in GEDI uses pulsed laser beams to measure variable distances to the Earth. However, to answer this would require years of continuous data and the short mission is only expected to last two.įrom orbit, GEDI will provide high-resolution images of the world’s forest vertical structure on a global scale. This will help answer important questions like whether forests are slowing down or amplifying climate change. Researchers are hoping these extensive maps will enable better estimates of the biomass of global forests and how much carbon they store. Furthermore, forests can be lost to wildfires and selective logging practices. Every year, around 50 thousand square kilometres of forests are cleared for industrial agriculture, including palm oil plantations and lucrative crops, as well as other forms of commodity-driven deforestation. In fact, many of these areas have instead become carbon sources ― as trees are cut down or burned, carbon dioxide (CO2) is released into the atmosphere. The Earth’s forests act as carbon sinks, however, deforestation and repurposing of land for agriculture have affected the amount of carbon being soaked up. The new data will be combined with ground measurements and statistical models to create maps of tropical forest carbon at a 1-kilometre resolution. The so-called Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) was mounted in the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and deployed. On 5 December, NASA launched the first-of-its-kind Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) instrument designed to create a 3D map of the world’s forests.

Earth maps 3d