Project Funding: 2006 - 2009

NRA: 2005 NASA: North American Carbon Program   

Funded by NASA

Abstract:
We plan to provide the essential elements for deriving continental-scale carbon budgets for North America, and to obtain accurate carbon budgets on a pilot basis for large areas of North America. We will complete our Model-Data Fusion Framework (MDFF) for determining regional/continental fluxes for CO2, which uses a new remote-sensing driven surface flux model, the Vegetation Photosynthesis and Respiration Model (VPRM) and on a high-resolution atmospheric adjoint model, the Stochastic Time-inverted Lagrangian Transport (STILT) model. The VPRM ingests remote sensing and meteorological data to produce prior CO2 fluxes constrained to closely match tower flux data. The VPRM has an ultra-simple structure to facilitate incorporation into the adjoint and parameter inversion framework. STILT captures near-field influences as signal, rather than noise. The framework has also been applied to CO and will be extended to CH4. A priori parameters of the VPRM will be optimized using constraints from concentrations observed at surface stations and by aircraft. We plan to rigorously test the MDFF and demonstrate its application by obtaining carbon budgets for the Northeast (New England, Quebec) for several annual cycles, for transects across N. America in summer 2003, and for the Mid-continent Intensive of the NACP. A new application of GLAS spaceborne LIDAR will be used to incorporate ecosystem structure (correlated with stand age and site index) into the VPRM for carbon budget analysis. Also, the Ecosystem Demography model (ED2), an age- and height-structured dynamic vegetation and ecosystem model that has been coupled to RAMS and STILT, will be adapted for North America. ED2 will be constrained by forest and other land inventories, eddy flux data, remote sensing constraints, and GLAS data. ED2 will provide the capability of assessing multi-way coupling between climate, land management, and carbon cycle, for decision support. Applications of ED2 will include assessment of long- and short-term effects of recent intense hurricanes and droughts on regional (S. E. and S. W., respectively) C budgets; Our software and databases are 100% open source and will be publicly available (as many already are), including everything needed to support the growing community of outside users of this framework.

Publications:

Miller, S. M., Matross, D. M., Andrews, A. E., Millet, D. B., Longo, M., Gottlieb, E. W., Hirsch, A. I., Gerbig, C., Lin, J. C., Daube, B. C., Hudman, R. C., Dias, P. L. S., Chow, V. Y., Wofsy, S. C. 2008. Sources of carbon monoxide and formaldehyde in North America determined from high-resolution atmospheric data. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. 8(24), 7673-7696. DOI: 10.5194/acp-8-7673-2008

2010 NASA Terrestrial Ecology Science Team Meeting Poster(s)

• Spatial and Temporal Distributions of Methane and Nitrous Oxide Emissions in North America   --   (Eric A. Kort, Scot M. Miller, Talya Havice, Colm Sweeney, Arlyn E. Andrews, Ed J. Dlugokencky, Pieter Tans, Adam Hirsch, Doug Worthy, Janusz Eluszkiewicz, Thomas Nehrkorn, Anna Michalak, Hanqin Tian, Steven C. Wofsy)   [abstract]

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

• NASA Terrestrial Ecology (TE) Project Profile
• North American Carbon Program (NACP) Project Profile