Davis, Kenneth (Ken): The Pennsylvania State University (Project Lead)
Project Funding:
2014 - 2017
NRA: 2013 NASA: Carbon Cycle Science
Funded by NASA
Abstract:
Understanding the terrestrial carbon cycle remains a high priority for understanding climate change. The carbon balance of North American remains uncertain. The southeastern U.S. is one of the most biological productive, heavily managed, and poorly studied regions of the North American continent. We do not yet have an operational model-data synthesis system that we can use to diagnose and understand continental and regional net annual biogenic CO2 fluxes with confidence. The NACP Midcontinent Intensive (MCI) regional study demonstrated the potential for the creation of such an operational system. The NACP MCI utilized high-density atmospheric CO2 observations, regional atmospheric inversion modeling, and carefully constructed agricultural and forest inventories, and found convergence in the regional carbon balance of the U.S. midcontinent for 2007.
We propose to apply recent advances in atmospheric inversion methodology and observational technology to study the carbon balance of North America as a whole with special emphasis, including new terrestrial inventory assessments, on the dynamic and relatively understudied southeastern United States.
Our objectives are to:
1. Quantify net fluxes of CO2 from the terrestrial ecosystems of the southeast using a regional atmospheric inversion for the years 2014-2015.
2. Compare the results of our 2014-2015 southeast atmospheric inversion to other regional flux estimates including forest inventories, biogeochemical models, and other atmospheric inversions.
3. Reduce uncertainty in atmospheric inverse estimates of the North American CO2 balance for the period from 2010 - 2015.
4. Provide estimates of the seasonal and annual net CO2 balance for 6 regions of North America.
5. Examine the interannual variability of the seasonal and annual net CO2 balance for these 6 sub-regions of North America for the period from 2010 through 2015.
6. Compare the solutions obtained using our continental inversion system to the fluxes obtained by NOAA's CarbonTracker system and Colorado State's Geos-Chem/EnKF system.
The project will utilize the expanded North American CO2 observational network, satellite-based (GOSAT and OCO-2) CO2 observations, the Penn State regional atmospheric inversion system nested within two different state-of-the-art global data assimilation systems, a network of CO2 measurements deployed in the southeastern U.S. in anticipation of the launch of OCO-2, advanced uncertainty estimation methods developed for the NACP MCI, and state-of-the-art assessments of the major terms in biomass inventories in the southeastern U.S.
The project will: 1) reduce uncertainty in the overall continental carbon balance and especially in the southeastern U.S.; 2) evaluate inventory estimates of southeastern U.S. CO2 fluxes; 3) demonstrate a joint atmosphere- and inventory-based carbon cycle observation system which, if maintained, could be used to detect and understand changes in terrestrial fluxes; 4) explore the utility of remotely sensed atmospheric CO2 data in regional to continental scale atmospheric inversions; and 5) motivate extension of this diagnostic approach to other regions of the continent and the world.
This project in particular focuses on research theme four of this call, 'Carbon dynamics within urban-suburban-forested-agricultural landscapes (NOAA, USDA, DOE, NASA).'
Publications:
Diaz-Isaac, L. I., Lauvaux, T., Bocquet, M., Davis, K. J. 2019. Calibration of a multi-physics ensemble for estimating the uncertainty of a greenhouse gas atmospheric transport model. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. 19(8), 5695-5718. DOI: 10.5194/acp-19-5695-2019
Diaz-Isaac, L. I., Lauvaux, T., Davis, K. J. 2018. Impact of physical parameterizations and initial conditions on simulated atmospheric transport and CO<sub>2</sub> mole fractions in the US Midwest. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. 18(20), 14813-14835. DOI: 10.5194/acp-18-14813-2018
Wesloh, D., Lauvaux, T., Davis, K. J. 2020. Development of a Mesoscale Inversion System for Estimating Continental-Scale CO
2
Fluxes. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems. 12(9). DOI: 10.1029/2019MS001818
2015 NASA Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Joint Science Workshop Poster(s)
- The Gulf Coast Intensive: Progress towards high-fidelity, regional-scale inverse estimates of the North American terrestrial carbon budget.
-- (Kenneth James Davis, Martha Butler, George James Collatz, Aijun Deng, Liza Ivelisse Diaz-Isaac, Thomas Lauvaux, Natasha Miles, Caroline Normile, Stephen M Ogle, Scott Richardson, Andrew Schuh, Tristram O. West, Christopher A Williams)
[abstract]
More details may be found in the following project profile(s):
