Sources of variations in total column carbon dioxide

By G. Keppel‐Aleks, Paul O. Wennberg, Tapio Schneider. 2010

163 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Observations of gradients in the total CO_2 column, (CO2), are expected to provide improved constraints on surface fluxes of CO_2. Here we use a general circulation model with a variety of prescribed carbon fluxes to investigate how variations in (CO_2) arise. On diurnal scales, variations are small and are forced by both local fluxes and advection. On seasonal scales, gradients are set by the north-south flux distribution. On synoptic scales, variations arise due to large-scale eddy-driven disturbances of the meridional gradient. In this case, because variations in (CO_2) are tied to synoptic activity, significant correlations exist between (CO_2) and dynamical tracers. We illustrate how such correlations can be used to describe the north-south gradients of (CO_2) and the underlying fluxes on continental scales. These simulations suggest a novel analysis framework for using column observations in carbon cycle science.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aea45e3443191be746636c32bff01921a22200aa

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In Environmental Engineering

Frédéric Chevallier

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Improved retrievals of carbon dioxide from Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 with the version 8 ACOS algorithm (2018, methodology): “…scheme (Cogan et al., 2012; Inoue et al., 2013; Oshchepkov et al., 2013; Kulawik et al., 2016), a scheme based on the potential temperature at 700 hPa (Keppel-Aleks et al., 2011; Wunch et al., 2011b), model-based selection (Guerlet et al., 2013), and geostatistical selection (Nguyen et al., 2014).”
Calibration of TCCON column-averaged CO2: the first aircraft campaign over European TCCON sites (2011, background): “, 2011), but also provides insights into carbon cycle science (e.g. Yang et al., 2007; Keppel-Aleks et al., 2011).”
Comparisons of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) X CO 2 measurements with TCCON (2016, background): “The XCO2 quantity is useful for carbon cycle science, as it is used to directly infer surface fluxes of CO2, and is relatively insensitive to vertical mixing (Yang et al., 2007; Keppel-Aleks et al., 2011).”
Carbon monitoring system flux estimation and attribution: impact of ACOS-GOSAT XCO2 sampling on the inference of terrestrial biospheric sources and sinks (2014, background): “This spatial resolution is sufficient to capture the large-scale atmospheric transport, which is the primary driver of column CO2 (XCO2) variability (Keppel-Aleks et al., 2011).”