Biogeosciences www.biogeosciences.net 1726-4170 1726-4189 7 5 2010 10.5194/bg-7-1625-2010 http://www.biogeosciences.net/7/1625/2010/ http://www.biogeosciences.net/7/1625/2010/bg-7-1625-2010.html http://www.biogeosciences.net/7/1625/2010/bg-7-1625-2010.pdf 1625 1644 2010-05-20 A regional high-resolution carbon flux inversion of North America for 2004 A. E. Schuh aschuh@atmos.colostate.edu A. S. Denning K. D. Corbin I. T. Baker M. Uliasz N. Parazoo A. E. Andrews D. E. J. Worthy Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Earth System Research Laboratory, 325 Broadway R/GMD1, Boulder, CO 80305, USA Environment Canada, 4905 Dufferin Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada now at: CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research Aspendale, VIC, Aspendale, Australia Resolving the discrepancies between NEE estimates based upon (1) ground studies and (2) atmospheric inversion results, demands increasingly sophisticated techniques. In this paper we present a high-resolution inversion based upon a regional meteorology model (RAMS) and an underlying biosphere (SiB3) model, both running on an identical 40 km grid over most of North America. Current operational systems like CarbonTracker as well as many previous global inversions including the Transcom suite of inversions have utilized inversion regions formed by collapsing biome-similar grid cells into larger aggregated regions. An extreme example of this might be where corrections to NEE imposed on forested regions on the east coast of the United States might be the same as that imposed on forests on the west coast of the United States while, in reality, there likely exist subtle differences in the two areas, both natural and anthropogenic. Our current inversion framework utilizes a combination of previously employed inversion techniques while allowing carbon flux corrections to be biome independent. Temporally and spatially high-resolution results utilizing biome-independent corrections provide insight into carbon dynamics in North America. In particular, we analyze hourly CO₂ mixing ratio data from a sparse network of eight towers in North America for 2004. A prior estimate of carbon fluxes due to Gross Primary Productivity (GPP) and Ecosystem Respiration (ER) is constructed from the SiB3 biosphere model on a 40 km grid. A combination of transport from the RAMS and the Parameterized Chemical Transport Model (PCTM) models is used to forge a connection between upwind biosphere fluxes and downwind observed CO₂ mixing ratio data. A Kalman filter procedure is used to estimate weekly corrections to biosphere fluxes based upon observed CO₂. RMSE-weighted annual NEE estimates, over an ensemble of potential inversion parameter sets, show a mean estimate 0.57 Pg/yr sink in North America. 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