Atmospheric CO₂ inversions on the mesoscale using data-driven prior uncertainties : quantification of the European terrestrial CO₂ fluxes

Summary, in English

Optimized biogenic carbon fluxes for Europe wereestimated from high-resolution regional-scale inversions, uti-lizing atmospheric CO2measurements at 16 stations for theyear 2007. Additional sensitivity tests with different data-driven error structures were performed. As the atmosphericnetwork is rather sparse and consequently contains large spa-tial gaps, we use a priori biospheric fluxes to further constrainthe inversions. The biospheric fluxes were simulated by theVegetation Photosynthesis and Respiration Model (VPRM)at a resolution of 0.1◦and optimized against eddy covari-ance data. Overall we estimate an a priori uncertainty of0.54 GtC yr−1related to the poor spatial representation be-tween the biospheric model and the ecosystem sites. The sinkestimated from the atmospheric inversions for the area of Eu-rope (as represented in the model domain) ranges between0.23 and 0.38 GtC yr−1(0.39 and 0.71 GtC yr−1up-scaled togeographical Europe). This is within the range of posteriorflux uncertainty estimates of previous studies using ground-based observations.

• Author: Panagiotis Kountouris; Christoph Gerbig; Christian Rödenbeck; Ute Karstens; Thomas F. Koch; Martin Heimann
• Department/s: eSSENCE: The e-Science Collaboration
• Publishing year: 2018-03-02
• Language: English
• Pages: 3047-3064
• Publication/Series: Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 4
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-3047-2018
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Copernicus GmbH
• Topic: Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1680-7324