NOAA, United Airlines team up to monitor the impact of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere

MINNEAPOLIS — A unique partnership will give scientists a new way to monitor greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. It involves a major airline teaming up with a federal weather agency to track gases that contribute to climate change and impact our forecasts.

The partnership is four years in the making. NOAA and United Airlines are coming together to better understand just how much, and where, greenhouse gases are in our atmosphere.

"We're going to get measurements really frequently in parts of the atmosphere that we don't get to measure from often. We, right now, have only 500 flights a year that we pay for to be able to do that. This will increase it four to five fold on a single aircraft," said Sarah Kapnick, Chief Scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In addition to the ongoing satellite and ground data, a Boeing 737 will take air samples and measure gases like methane, carbon dioxide and water vapor. That vapor can form contrails which impact our weather and climate.

"Those clouds actually also cause global warming, and so if we can better predict where those are or going to be, or notice when aircraft move into that space they will be able to create it, they can then move out of it to be able to not create those clouds," Kapnick said.

Kapnick mentioned they did talk with other airlines, but United's flight path worked best, over a variety of urban and rural environments, filling in the gaps in their current data.

"I'm just so excited about this. Really, it's the advancement of the best in science that we have from our academic partners and the US government," said Kapnick. "And then we're partnering with the private sector to scale it up as fast as possible."

Kapnick said they hope to have the sensor installed by next spring to collect data through 2025. Then they'll figure out how to best integrate the data before scaling up the project.