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Funded Research

NASA CMS Pilot Projects: Surface Carbon Fluxes

Gunson, Michael (Mike): JPL (Project Lead)
Jucks, Kenneth (Ken): NASA Headquarters (Project Lead)
Pawson, Steven: NASA GSFC GMAO (Project Lead)
Potter, Christopher: NASA ARC (Project Lead)
Bowman, Kevin: JPL (Participant)
Brix, Holger: UCLA (Participant)
Collatz, George (Jim): NASA GSFC - retired (Participant)
Dutkiewicz, Stephanie: MIT (Participant)
Eldering, Annmarie: Jet Propulsion Laboratory / Caltech (Participant)
Farfan, Martha: JPL (Participant)
Fisher, Joshua: Chapman University (Participant)
Follows, Michael (Mick): MIT (Participant)
Gregg, Watson: NASA GSFC (Participant)
Hill, Christopher (Chris): MIT (Participant)
Kawa, Stephan (Randy): NASA GSFC (Participant)
Klooster, Steven: NASA Ames Research Center - Cal State Univ Monterey Bay (Participant)
Lee, Meemong: JPL (Participant)
Liu, Junjie: JPL (Participant)
McGrath-Spangler, Erica: NASA GSFC / USRA (Participant)
Menemenlis, Dimitris: Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Participant)
Ott, Lesley: NASA GSFC GMAO (Participant)
Rousseaux, Cecile: NASA GSFC (Participant)
Worden, John: JPL (Participant)
Zeng, Fanwei: NASA GSFC / SSAI (Participant)
Zhu, Zhengxin: NASA GSFC / SSAI (Participant)

Project Funding: 2009 - 2011

NRA: 2009 NASA: Directed Funding   

Funded by NASA

Abstract:
There are no direct global-scale observations of carbon fluxes between the land and oceans and the over lying atmosphere. Understanding the carbon cycle requires estimates of these fluxes, which can be computed indirectly using models constrained with global space-based observations that provide information about the physical and biological state of the land, atmosphere or ocean. This pilot study will generate CO2 flux maps for one year (July 2009-June 2010) using observational constraints in NASA's state-of-the-art models. Bottom-up surface flux estimates will be computed using data-constrained land (two variants of CASA) and ocean (ECCO2 and NOBM) models; comparison of the different techniques will provide some knowledge of uncertainty in these estimates. Ensembles of atmospheric carbon distributions will be computed using an atmospheric general circulation model (GEOS-5), with perturbations to the surface fluxes and to transport. Top-down flux estimates will be computed from observed atmospheric CO2 distributions (ACOS/GOSAT retrievals) along side the forward-model fields, in conjunction with an inverse approach based on the CO2 adjoint of GEOS-Chem. The forward model ensembles will be used to build understanding of relationships among surface flux perturbations, transport uncertainty and atmospheric carbon concentration. This will help construct uncertainty estimates and information on the true spatial resolution of the top-down flux calculations. The agreement of the top-down and bottom-up flux distributions will be documented.

Publications:

Potter, C., Klooster, S., Genovese, V., Hiatt, C., Boriah, S., Kumar, V., Mithal, V., Garg, A. 2012. Terrestrial Ecosystem Carbon Fluxes Predicted from MODIS Satellite Data and Large-Scale Disturbance Modeling. International Journal of Geosciences. 03(03), 469-479. DOI: 10.4236/ijg.2012.33050

More details may be found in the following project profile(s):