The
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Monitoring and
Diagnostics Laboratory has been working to build a network of tall tower
monitoring sites over the US
since the early 1990’s. Tall tower CO2 mixing ratio measurements are
sensitive to upwind fluxes over scales of hundreds of kilometers. Such
measurements therefore place strong constraints on estimates of regional scale
carbon budgets. We have used the Stochastic Time Inverted Lagrangian Transport
(STILT) model to evaluate the relative contributions of upwind sources and
sinks to simulated CO2 mixing ratios at existing and proposed new
tower sites. For example, sampling footprints from STILT have been combined
with estimates of hourly ecosystem CO2 fluxes from the Simple
Biosphere (SiB) model to investigate the spatiotemporal influence of different
biomes on observed CO2 concentrations at the towers. Contributions
of fossil fuel and oceanic CO2 fluxes can also be quantified using
this method.
Author: A.E. Andrews, P.S. Bakwin, P.P. Tans, J. Kofler, C. Zhao, J. (Arlyn dot Andrews at noaa dot gov)
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