Project Funding: 2012 - 2014

NRA: 2011 NASA: Carbon Monitoring System   

Funded by NASA

Abstract:
We propose to evolve the Carbon Monitoring System Flux Pilot Project funded under Phase 1 into a framework that integrates observational constraints on all major components of the carbon-cycle-anthropogenic system anthropogenic, terrestrial, oceanic, atmospheric in a top-down CO2 attribution system constrained by atmospheric satellite observations. This expanded framework will enable a deeper understanding of the global carbon cycle and a means of quantifying the effectiveness of climate mitigation policies. This CMS-FPP is motivated by the increase in tropospheric CO2 from anthropogenic emissions, which is the single largest driver of observed and predicted climate change [Forster et al, 2007]. However, roughly half of the CO2 produced from these emissions has been removed by terrestrial and ocean sinks. Consequently, The future trajectory of climate forcing will depend on future emissions and on the capacity of the carbon-cycle to absorb more CO2 [Friedlingstein, 2008]. Recent years have seen an acceleration of fossil fuel emissions and signs of an onset of carbon-cycle feedbacks [Canadell et al, 2007]. Since 2005, fossil fuel emissions have been regionally redistributed towards developing countries, which now make up more than half of CO2 emissions (>4 PgC/yr) [Peters et al, 2012]. While the global carbon budget and its partitioning between anthropogenic, terrestrial, and oceanic fluxes are reasonably understood, the contribution of regional drivers to that budget are not [Canadell et al, 2010]. Consequently, uncertainty in the attribution of CO2 accumulation rate on a year-to-year basis to those drivers limits our capacity to quantify the effectiveness of climate mitigation policies [Le Quere et al, 2009]. In order to reduce uncertainty in CO2 attribution, we will simultaneously improve and augment all major aspects of the current CMS-FPP: new satellites observations, an additional terrestrial eco-system model, a new fossil fuel assimilation system, updated ocean assimilation algorithms, and improved atmospheric inversion algorithms. The CMS-FPP Phase 2 will generate a suite of new and updated products covering 7/2009- 2011 including new global spatially resolved CO2 sources and sinks, new high resolution global fossil fuel emissions, better estimates of oceanic CO2 air-sea exchange, new estimates of global above-ground biomass, and refinements in top-down attribution and uncertainty algorithms. Products generated from bottom-up and top-down estimates will be made publically available through carbon.nasa.gov and linked to cmsflux.jpl.nasa.gov. Through these updates, the CMS-FPP will play a crucial and on-going role in assessing the current capability of space-borne observing systems to improve our knowledge of the integrated carbon-cycle-anthropogenic system and its impact on climate forcing

Publications:

Haynes, K. D., Baker, I. T., Denning, A. S., Stockli, R., Schaefer, K., Lokupitiya, E. Y., Haynes, J. M. 2019. Representing Grasslands Using Dynamic Prognostic Phenology Based on Biological Growth Stages: 1. Implementation in the Simple Biosphere Model (SiB4). Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems. 11(12), 4423-4439. DOI: 10.1029/2018MS001540

Haynes, K. D., Baker, I. T., Denning, A. S., Wolf, S., Wohlfahrt, G., Kiely, G., Minaya, R. C., Haynes, J. M. 2019. Representing Grasslands Using Dynamic Prognostic Phenology Based on Biological Growth Stages: Part 2. Carbon Cycling. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems. 11(12), 4440-4465. DOI: 10.1029/2018MS001541

Haynes, K., I. Baker, and S. Denning. 2020. Simple Biosphere Model version 4.2 (SiB4) technical description. Mountain Scholar, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA. https://hdl.handle.net/10217/200691

Hogue, S., Marland, E., Andres, R. J., Marland, G., Woodard, D. 2016. Uncertainty in gridded CO 2 emissions estimates. Earth's Future. 4(5), 225-239. DOI: 10.1002/2015EF000343

Brix, H., Menemenlis, D., Hill, C., Dutkiewicz, S., Jahn, O., Wang, D., Bowman, K., Zhang, H. 2015. Using Green's Functions to initialize and adjust a global, eddying ocean biogeochemistry general circulation model. Ocean Modelling. 95, 1-14. DOI: 10.1016/j.ocemod.2015.07.008

Bousserez, N., Henze, D. K., Perkins, A., Bowman, K. W., Lee, M., Liu, J., Deng, F., Jones, D. B. A. 2015. Improved analysis-error covariance matrix for high-dimensional variational inversions: application to source estimation using a 3D atmospheric transport model. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. 141(690), 1906-1921. DOI: 10.1002/qj.2495

Liu, J., Bowman, K. W., Lee, M., Henze, D. K., Bousserez, N., Brix, H., James Collatz, G., Menemenlis, D., Ott, L., Pawson, S., Jones, D., Nassar, R. 2014. Carbon monitoring system flux estimation and attribution: impact of ACOS-GOSAT XCO2 sampling on the inference of terrestrial biospheric sources and sinks. Tellus B: Chemical and Physical Meteorology. 66(1), 22486. DOI: 10.3402/tellusb.v66.22486

Asefi-Najafabady, S., Rayner, P. J., Gurney, K. R., McRobert, A., Song, Y., Coltin, K., Huang, J., Elvidge, C., Baugh, K. 2014. A multiyear, global gridded fossil fuel CO2emission data product: Evaluation and analysis of results. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. 119(17), 10,213-10,231. DOI: 10.1002/2013JD021296

2015 NASA Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Joint Science Workshop Poster(s)

• Surface CO2 flux estimation and validation for 2010 and 2011 from CMS-Flux   --   (Junjie Liu, Kevin W Bowman, Michelle Gierach, George James Collatz, Meemong Lee, Kevin Robert Gurney, John Miller, Dimitris Menemenlis, Nicolas Bousserez)   [abstract]

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

• North American Carbon Program (NACP) Project Profile
• NASA Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) Project Profile