An atmospheric perspective on North American carbon dioxide exchange: CarbonTracker

By W. Peters, A. Jacobson, Colm Sweeney, A. Andrews, T. Conway, K. Masarie, John B. Miller, L. Bruhwiler, G. Pétron, A. Hirsch and 6 more. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2007

1,070 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present an estimate of net CO2 exchange between the terrestrial biosphere and the atmosphere across North America for every week in the period 2000 through 2005. This estimate is derived from a set of 28,000 CO2 mole fraction observations in the global atmosphere that are fed into a state-of-the-art data assimilation system for CO2 called CarbonTracker. By design, the surface fluxes produced in CarbonTracker are consistent with the recent history of CO2 in the atmosphere and provide constraints on the net carbon flux independent from national inventories derived from accounting efforts. We find the North American terrestrial biosphere to have absorbed −0.65 PgC/yr (1 petagram = 1015 g; negative signs are used for carbon sinks) averaged over the period studied, partly offsetting the estimated 1.85 PgC/yr release by fossil fuel burning and cement manufacturing. Uncertainty on this estimate is derived from a set of sensitivity experiments and places the sink within a range of −0.4 to −1.0 PgC/yr. The estimated sink is located mainly in the deciduous forests along the East Coast (32%) and the boreal coniferous forests (22%). Terrestrial uptake fell to −0.32 PgC/yr during the large-scale drought of 2002, suggesting sensitivity of the contemporary carbon sinks to climate extremes. CarbonTracker results are in excellent agreement with a wide collection of carbon inventories that form the basis of the first North American State of the Carbon Cycle Report (SOCCR), to be released in 2007. All CarbonTracker results are freely available at http://carbontracker.noaa.gov.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6bf90a62d728887988865a9085e25f2262db62f2

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Citations in the corpus

What can we learn from European continuous atmospheric CO 2 measurements to quantify regional fluxes – Part 2: Sensitivity of flux accuracy to inverse setup (2008, background): “This daytime selection strategy is currently applied by modelers simulating continuous CO2 data (Geels et al., 2007; Peters et al., 2007; Law et al., 2008), and by experimentalists taking flask samples.”
Improved retrievals of carbon dioxide from Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 with the version 8 ACOS algorithm (2018, background): “8 Special 4D-Var TM3 Rödenbeck (2005) CarbonTracker CT2015, CASA EnKF TM5 Peters et al. (2007), with updates CT-NRT.v2016-1 documented at https://carbontracker.noaa.gov (last access: 4 December 2018) TM5-4DVar 2016 CASA 4D-Var TM5 Basu et al. (2013) OU 2016 CASA 4D-Var TM5 Crowell et al. (2018b) rio”
Retrieval of atmospheric CO2 with enhanced accuracy and precision from SCIAMACHY: validation with FTS measurements and comparison with model results (2011, methodology): “This aspect has already been discussed by Peters et al. [2007]. An extrapolation to sites where the assimilated data product is at significant distance is, therefore, not possible.”
A method for improved SCIAMACHY CO 2 retrieval in the presence of optically thin clouds (2009, background): “(2008) found that discrepancies of the southern hemispheric annual cycle of SCIAMACHY retrieved XCO2 and corresponding values of NOAA’s CO2 assimilation system CarbonTracker (Peters et al., 2007) can be most likely explained by sub visible 10 cirrus clouds.”
Methane retrievals from Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT) shortwave infrared measurements: Performance comparison of proxy and physics retrieval algorithms (2012, methodology): “Its atmospheric abundance is available from, for instance, the Carbon Tracker data assimilation system [ Peters et al. , 2007] that is used in this research.”