Measuring lake carbon dioxide from space: Opportunities and challenges

Inland waters such as lakes are important CO₂ emitter, however, accurately estimate the emissions is still a big challenge, leading to large uncertainty to the terrestrial carbon sinks estimation. Compared to the abundant lakes with diverse types, the limited sampling data with strong randomness at global, national, regional-scale contributed to large uncertainly of lake CO₂ emissions estimation. Satellites have accumulated a large amount of long-term data at large spatial coverage with high temporal resolution, which not only can depict the current situation but also can reconstruct the past, and then play crucial role in lake CO₂ emissions estimation via mapping. In this perspective, we highlight the key opportunities and challenges of lake CO₂ estimation with satellite. We believe that satellite remote sensing holds the potential to address the existing knowledge gap in lake CO₂ emissions.