A regional carbon flux data assimilation system and its preliminary evaluation in East Asia

Abstract

Abstract. In order to optimize surface CO2 fluxes at finer scales, a regional surface CO2 flux inversion system (Carbon Flux Inversion system and Community Multi-scale Air Quality, CFI-CMAQ) has been developed by simultaneously assimilating CO2 concentrations and surface CO2 fluxes into the regional modeling system, CMAQ. The smoothing operator is associated with the atmospheric transport model to constitute a persistence dynamical model to forecast the surface CO2 flux scaling factors. In this implementation, the "signal-to-noise" problem can be avoided; plus, any useful observed information achieved by the current assimilation cycle can be transferred into the next assimilation cycle. Thus, the surface CO2 fluxes can be optimized as a whole at the grid scale in CFI-CMAQ. The performance of CFI-CMAQ was quantitatively evaluated through a set of Observing System Simulation Experiments (OSSEs) by assimilating CO2 retrievals from GOSAT (Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite). The results showed that the CO2 concentration assimilation using the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) could constrain the CO2 concentrations effectively, illustrating that the simultaneous assimilation of CO2 concentrations can provide convincing CO2 initial analysis fields for CO2 flux inversion. In addition, the CO2 flux optimization using the ensemble Kalman smoother (EnKS) demonstrated that CFI-CMAQ could in general reproduce true fluxes at finer scales with acceptable bias. Two further sets of numerical experiments were conducted to investigate the sensitivities of the inflation factor of scaling factors and the smoother window. The results showed that the ability of CFI-CMAQ to optimize CO2 fluxes greatly relied on the choice of the inflation factor. However, the smoother window had a slight influence on the optimized results. CFI-CMAQ performed very well even with a short lag-window (e.g. 3 days).