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Accounting for CO2 variability over East Asia with a regional joint inversion system and its preliminary evaluation

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Abstract

A regional surface carbon dioxide (CO2) flux inversion system, the Tan-Tracker-Region, was developed by incorporating an assimilation scheme into the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) regional chemical transport model to resolve fine-scale CO2 variability over East Asia. The proper orthogonal decomposition-based ensemble four-dimensional variational data assimilation approach (POD-4DVar) is the core algorithm for the joint assimilation framework, and simultaneous assimilations of CO2 concentrations and surface CO2 fluxes are applied to help reduce the uncertainty in initial CO2 concentrations. A persistence dynamical model was developed to describe the evolution of the surface CO2 fluxes and help avoid the “signal-to-noise” problem; thus, CO2 fluxes could be estimated as a whole at the model grid scale, with better use of observation information. The performance of the regional inversion system was evaluated through a group of single-observation-based observing system simulation experiments (OSSEs). The results of the experiments suggest that a reliable performance of Tan-Tracker-Region is dependent on certain assimilation parameter choices, for example, an optimized window length of approximately 3 h, an ensemble size of approximately 100, and a covariance localization radius of approximately 320 km. This is probably due to the strong diurnal variation and spatial heterogeneity in the fine-scale CMAQ simulation, which could affect the performance of the regional inversion system. In addition, because all observations can be artificially obtained in OSSEs, the performance of Tan-Tracker-Region was further evaluated through different densities of the artificial observation network in different CO2 flux situations. The results indicate that more observation sites would be useful to systematically improve the estimation of CO2 concentration and flux in large areas over the model domain. The work presented here forms a foundation for future research in which a thorough estimation of CO2 flux variability over East Asia could be performed with the regional inversion system.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. CarbonTracker results used in the model as initial fields and boundary conditions were provided by NOAA ESRL, Boulder, Colorado, USA (http://carbontracker.noaa.gov). We express deep gratitude to the research team and support staff for providing their data on the website.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Urban Meteorology, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, 100089, China

    Xingxia Kou

  2. State Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Boundary Layer Physics and Atmospheric Chemistry, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China

    Xingxia Kou & Meigen Zhang

  3. International Center for climate and Environment Sciences, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China

    Xiangjun Tian

  4. School of Atmospheric Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, China

    Zhen Peng

  5. School of Atmospheric Sciences, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu, 610225, China

    Xiaoling Zhang

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  1. Xingxia Kou
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  2. Xiangjun Tian
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  3. Meigen Zhang
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  4. Zhen Peng
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  5. Xiaoling Zhang
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Correspondence to Meigen Zhang.

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Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41130528), National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (2013AA122002), Strategic Priority Research Program—Climate Change: Carbon Budget and Relevant Issues (XDA05040404), and National Key Technology Research and Development Program of China (2016YFC0202103).

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Kou, X., Tian, X., Zhang, M. et al. Accounting for CO2 variability over East Asia with a regional joint inversion system and its preliminary evaluation. J Meteorol Res 31, 834–851 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13351-017-6149-8

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