On observational and modelling strategies targeted at regional carbon exchange over continents

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Abstract

Estimating carbon exchange at regional scales is paramount to understanding feedbacks between climate and the carbon cycle, but also to verifying climate change mitigation such as emission reductions and strategies compensating for emissions such as carbon sequestration. This paper discusses evidence for a number of important shortcomings of current generation modelling frameworks designed to provide regional scale budgets from atmospheric observations. Current top-down and bottom-up approaches targeted at deriving consistent regional scale carbon exchange estimates for biospheric and anthropogenic sources and sinks are hampered by a number of issues: we show that top-down constraints using point measurements made from tall towers, although sensitive to larger spatial scales, are however influenced by local areas much more strongly than previously thought. On the other hand, classical bottom-up approaches using process information collected at the local scale, such as from eddy covariance data, need up-scaling and validation on larger scales. We therefore argue for a combination of both approaches, implicitly providing the important local scale information for the top-down constraint, and providing the atmospheric constraint for up-scaling of flux measurements. Combining these data streams necessitates quantifying their respective representation errors, which are discussed. The impact of these findings on future network design is highlighted, and some recommendations are given. © Author(s) 2009.

Figures

  • Fig. 1. Contribution to the afternoon signal (15:00 local time) due to biosphere-atmosphere exchange at different distances from the measurement location for the period of August 2002, shown as contributions from the individual annuli. The color legend indicates the radius of the outer boundary of each annulus.
  • Fig. 2. Monthly-averaged contributions to the signal at 15:00 local time due to biosphere-atmosphere exchange at different distances from the measurement location, shown as contributions from the individual annuli with grey lines indicating monthly standard deviations (a), and together with contributions from respiration and photosynthesis fluxes (grey solid and dashed line respectively) (b).
  • Table 1. Uncertainties involved in model-data-fusion using mixing ratio measurements to derive regional fluxes of CO2, and impact on the observational strategy when attempting to minimize their impact on flux estimates.
  • Fig. 3. Simplified schematics of a Model-Data-Fusion system using multiple data streams to derive information on surface-atmosphere fluxes.

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APA

Gerbig, C., Dolman, A. J., & Heimann, M. (2009). On observational and modelling strategies targeted at regional carbon exchange over continents. Biogeosciences, 6(10), 1949–1959. https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-6-1949-2009

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