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Quantifying the Observability of CO2 Flux Uncertainty in Atmospheric CO2 Records Using Products from Nasa's Carbon Monitoring Flux Pilot ProjectNASAs Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) Flux Pilot Project (FPP) was designed to better understand contemporary carbon fluxes by bringing together state-of-the art models with remote sensing datasets. Here we report on simulations using NASAs Goddard Earth Observing System Model, version 5 (GEOS-5) which was used to evaluate the consistency of two different sets of observationally constrained land and ocean fluxes with atmospheric CO2 records. Despite the strong data constraint, the average difference in annual terrestrial biosphere flux between the two land (NASA Ames CASA and CASA-GFED) models is 1.7 Pg C for 2009-2010. Ocean models (NOBM and ECCO2-Darwin) differ by 35 in their global estimates of carbon flux with particularly strong disagreement in high latitudes. Based upon combinations of terrestrial and ocean fluxes, GEOS-5 reasonably simulated the seasonal cycle observed at northern hemisphere surface sites and by the Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT) while the model struggled to simulate the seasonal cycle at southern hemisphere surface locations. Though GEOS-5 was able to reasonably reproduce the patterns of XCO2 observed by GOSAT, it struggled to reproduce these aspects of AIRS observations. Despite large differences between land and ocean flux estimates, resulting differences in atmospheric mixing ratio were small, typically less than 5 ppmv at the surface and 3 ppmv in the XCO2 column. A statistical analysis based on the variability of observations shows that flux differences of these magnitudes are difficult to distinguish from natural variability, regardless of measurement platform.


Document ID
20150001279
Acquisition Source
Goddard Space Flight Center
Document Type
Preprint (Draft being sent to journal)
Authors
Ott, Lesley (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD United States)
Pawson, Steven (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD United States)
Collatz, Jim (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD United States)
Watson, Gregg (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD United States)
Menemenlis, Dimitris (Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Brix, Holger (California Univ. Los Angeles, CA, United States)
Rousseaux, Cecile (Universities Space Research Association Greenbelt, MD, United States)
Bowman, Kevin (Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Bowman, Kevin (Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Liu, Junjie (Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Eldering, Annmarie (Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Gunson, Michael (Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Kawa, Stephan R. (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD United States)
Date Acquired
February 3, 2015
Publication Date
January 1, 2014
Publication Information
Publisher: Wiley
Subject Category
Geosciences (General)
Report/Patent Number
GSFC-E-DAA-TN17514
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Public Use Permitted.
Keywords
FPP
GEOS-5
CMS

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