EAPSI: Benchmarking Carbon Dioxide Emissions from a Carbon-Cycle Simulation Model Against Observations of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide from Space

Calle Leonardo, Bozeman MT

Investigators

Abstract

Gaseous carbon in the atmosphere plays a large role in regulating global temperatures. However, plants use carbon dioxide (gas) and convert it to solid building blocks for growth, ultimately removing gaseous carbon from the atmosphere and providing short and long-term storage, reducing its effect on global temperatures. This research uses a simulation model to track carbon through the carbon cycle and provide estimates of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere from land use change activities such as de-forestation, forest degradation, and forest regrowth. This project builds on recent work by the Principal Investigator (PI), Dr. Prabir Patra (host scientist at Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology), and Dr. Ben Poulter (PI?s academic advisor) that provides estimates of carbon emissions due to land use change for a regional greenhouse-gases budget of Asia. These estimates of carbon emissions are simulations, so their accuracy is uncertain. This project?s main objective is to benchmark the simulated carbon emissions against observations of atmospheric carbon dioxide from a satellite that is operated and owned by Japan, the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT), which is the current gold standard for observations of global atmospheric carbon dioxide. Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (?DGVM?) simulate exchanges of carbon between the land (live plants, litter, and soil) and the atmosphere, and includes factors that affect plant?s efficiency to exchange carbon, such as weather (short-term) and climate (long-term patterns in precipitation and temperature), and competition from other plants. The CO2 fluxes from seven independent DGVMs will be combined with fossil fuel emissions (for control of ancillary terrestrial CO2 fluxes) obtained from a separate dataset, and together they will be used as boundary conditions for forward runs in an atmospheric chemistry-transport model, developed by the host scientist. The simulated CO2 fluxes from the atmospheric chemistry-transport model will then be benchmarked to GOSAT observations and evaluated for accuracy. A regional gridded, and GOSAT-derived, dataset of CO2 fluxes from land use change, for the years between 2009 to the present, will be created for Southeast Asia. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.