The browser you are using is not supported by this website. All versions of Internet Explorer are no longer supported, either by us or Microsoft (read more here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-ie-support).

Please use a modern browser to fully experience our website, such as the newest versions of Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari etc.

Portrait of Alex Vermeulen

Alex Vermeulen

Manager

Portrait of Alex Vermeulen

The regional European atmospheric transport inversion comparison, EUROCOM : First results on European-wide terrestrial carbon fluxes for the period 2006-2015

Author

  • Guillaume Monteil
  • Grégoire Broquet
  • Marko Scholze
  • Matthew Lang
  • Ute Karstens
  • Christoph Gerbig
  • Frank Thomas Koch
  • Naomi E. Smith
  • Rona L. Thompson
  • Ingrid T. Luijkx
  • Emily White
  • Antoon Meesters
  • Philippe Ciais
  • Anita L. Ganesan
  • Alistair Manning
  • Michael Mischurow
  • Wouter Peters
  • Philippe Peylin
  • Jerôme Tarniewicz
  • Matt Rigby
  • Christian Rödenbeck
  • Alex Vermeulen
  • Evie M. Walton
Show all

Summary, in English

Atmospheric inversions have been used for the past two decades to derive large-scale constraints on the sources and sinks of CO2 into the atmosphere. The development of dense in situ surface observation networks, such as ICOS in Europe, enables in theory inversions at a resolution close to the country scale in Europe. This has led to the development of many regional inversion systems capable of assimilating these high-resolution data, in Europe and elsewhere. The EUROCOM (European atmospheric transport inversion comparison) project is a collaboration between seven European research institutes, which aims at producing a collective assessment of the net carbon flux between the terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere in Europe for the period 2006 2015. It aims in particular at investigating the capacity of the inversions to deliver consistent flux estimates from the country scale up to the continental scale. The project participants were provided with a common database of in situ-observed CO2 concentrations (including the observation sites that are now part of the ICOS network) and were tasked with providing their best estimate of the net terrestrial carbon flux for that period, and for a large domain covering the entire European Union. The inversion systems differ by the transport model, the inversion approach, and the choice of observation and prior constraints, enabling us to widely explore the space of uncertainties. This paper describes the intercomparison protocol and the participating systems, and it presents the first results from a reference set of inversions, at the continental scale and in four large regions. At the continental scale, the regional inversions support the assumption that European ecosystems are a relatively small sink (-0:21 ± 0:2 Pg C yr-1). We find that the convergence of the regional inversions at this scale is not better than that obtained in state-of-the-art global inversions. However, more robust results are obtained for subregions within Europe, and in these areas with dense observational coverage, the objective of delivering robust countryscale flux estimates appears achievable in the near future.

Department/s

  • Dept of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science
  • eSSENCE: The e-Science Collaboration
  • MERGE: ModElling the Regional and Global Earth system
  • BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate
  • ICOS Sweden

Publishing year

2020

Language

English

Pages

12063-12091

Publication/Series

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

Volume

20

Issue

20

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Copernicus GmbH

Topic

  • Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences
  • Climate Research

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1680-7316