Sources of carbon monoxide and formaldehyde in North America determined from high-resolution atmospheric data

• Main Authors: Miller, S. M., Matross, D. M., Andrews, A. E., Millet, D. B., Longo, M., Gottlieb, E. W., Hirsch, A. I., Gerbig, C., Lin, J. C., Daube, B. C., Hudman, R. C., Dias, P. L. S., Chow, V. Y., Wofsy, S. C.
• Other Authors: Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences Cambridge, USA (EPS), Harvard University, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, ESRL Global Monitoring Laboratory Boulder (GML), NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Department of Soil, Water, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (MPI-BGC), Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences Waterloo, University of Waterloo Waterloo, National Laboratory of Scientific Computing
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2008
• Subjects: [SDU.OCEAN]Sciences of the Universe [physics]/Ocean; Atmosphere; Yukon; Alaska
• Online Access: https://hal.science/hal-00304251; https://hal.science/hal-00304251/document; https://hal.science/hal-00304251/file/acpd-8-11395-2008.pdf

International audience We analyze the North American budget for carbon monoxide using data for CO and formaldehyde concentrations from tall towers and aircraft in a model-data assimilation framework. The Stochastic Time-Inverted, Lagrangian Transport model for CO (STILT-CO) determines local to regional-scale CO contributions associated with production from fossil fuel combustion, biomass burning, and oxidation of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) using an ensemble of Lagrangian particles driven by high resolution assimilated meteorology. In most cases, the model demonstrates high fidelity simulations of hourly surface data from tall towers and point measurements from aircraft, with somewhat less satisfactory performance in coastal regions and when CO from large biomass fires in Alaska and the Yukon Territory influence the continental US. Inversions of STILT-CO simulations for CO and formaldehyde show that current inventories of CO emissions from fossil fuel combustion are significantly too high, by almost a factor of three in summer and a factor two in early spring, consistent with recent analyses of data from the INTEX-A aircraft program. Formaldehyde data help to show that sources of CO from oxidation of CH 4 and other VOCs represent the dominant sources of CO over North America in summer.