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Published January 10, 2013 | Published
Journal Article Open

Profiling tropospheric CO_2 using Aura TES and TCCON instruments

Abstract

Monitoring the global distribution and long-term variations of CO_2 sources and sinks is required for characterizing the global carbon budget. Total column measurements are useful for estimating regional-scale fluxes; however, model transport remains a significant error source, particularly for quantifying local sources and sinks. To improve the capability of estimating regional fluxes, we estimate lower tropospheric CO_2 concentrations from ground-based near-infrared (NIR) measurements with space-based thermal infrared (TIR) measurements. The NIR measurements are obtained from the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) of solar measurements, which provide an estimate of the total CO_2 column amount. Estimates of tropospheric CO_2 that are co-located with TCCON are obtained by assimilating Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) free tropospheric CO_2 estimates into the GEOS-Chem model. We find that quantifying lower tropospheric CO_2 by subtracting free tropospheric CO_2 estimates from total column estimates is a linear problem, because the calculated random uncertainties in total column and lower tropospheric estimates are consistent with actual uncertainties as compared to aircraft data. For the total column estimates, the random uncertainty is about 0.55 ppm with a bias of −5.66 ppm, consistent with previously published results. After accounting for the total column bias, the bias in the lower tropospheric CO_2 estimates is 0.26 ppm with a precision (one standard deviation) of 1.02 ppm. This precision is sufficient for capturing the winter to summer variability of approximately 12 ppm in the lower troposphere; double the variability of the total column. This work shows that a combination of NIR and TIR measurements can profile CO_2 with the precision and accuracy needed to quantify lower tropospheric CO_2 variability.

Additional Information

© 2013 Author(s). Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Received: 30 May 2012. Published in Atmos. Meas. Tech. Discuss.: 29 June 2012. Revised: 22 November 2012. Accepted: 7 December 2012. Published: 10 January 2013. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The GEOS-Chem model results with assimilated TES data was funded by proposal No. 09-ACOS09-0010. US funding for TCCON comes from NASA's Terrestrial Ecology Program, grant number NNX11AG01G, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory Program, the Atmospheric CO2 Observations from Space (ACOS) Program and the DOE/ARM Program. SGP data was supported by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research of the US Department of Energy under contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 as part of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program. The authors wish to thank G. Toon and P. Wennberg for making available their GFIT code and TCCON data. Edited by: K. Strong

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August 22, 2023
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