Study of the footprints of short-term variation in XCO 2 observed by TCCON sites using NIES and FLEXPART atmospheric transport models

• Published in: Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
• Main Authors: Belikov, D. A., Maksyutov, S., Ganshin, A., Zhuravlev, R., Deutscher, N. M., Wunch, D., Feist, D. G., Morino, I., Parker, Robert J., Strong, K., Yoshida, Y., Bril, A., Oshchepkov, S., Boesch, Hartmut, Dubey, M. K., Griffith, D., Hewson, Will, Kivi, R., Mendonca, J., Notholt, J., Schneider, M., Sussmann, R., Velazco, V. A., Aoki, S.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: European Geosciences Union (EGU), Copernicus Publications 2017
• Subjects: Arctic; Eureka; Leicester; IPY
• Online Access: http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/17/143/2017/; http://hdl.handle.net/2381/39188; https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-143-2017

The data sets are available at ftp://tccon.ornl.gov/ 2014Public/documentation/ (Wunch et al., 2015). The JRA-25/JCDAS meteorological data sets used in the simulations were provided by the Japan Meteorological Agency. The computational resources were provided by NIES. This study was performed by order of the Ministry for Education and Science of the Russian Federation No. 5.628.2014/K and was supported by The Tomsk State University Academic D. I. Mendeleev Fund Program in 2014–2015 and by the GRENE Arctic project. TCCON data were obtained from the TCCON Data Archive, hosted by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA, http://tccon.ornl.gov. The Ascension Island site has been funded by the Max Planck Society. The Bremen, Białystok and Orléans TCCON sites are funded by the EU projects InGOS and ICOS-INWIRE, and by the Senate of Bremen. The Darwin and Wollongong TCCON sites are funded by NASA grants NAG5-12247 and NNG05-GD07G, and Australian Research Council grants DP140101552, DP110103118, DP0879468, LE0668470 and LP0562346. We are grateful to the DOE ARM programme for technical support at the Darwin TCCON site. Nicholas Deutscher was supported by an Australian Research Council fellowship, DE140100178. The Eureka measurements were made at the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) by the Canadian Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Change (CANDAC) led by James R. Drummond, and in part by the Canadian Arctic ACE Validation Campaigns led by Kaley A. Walker. They were supported by the AIF/NSRIT, CFI, CFCAS, CSA, EC, GOC-IPY, NSERC, NSTP, OIT, ORF and PCSP. The University of Leicester data were obtained with funding from the UK National Centre for Earth Observation and the ESA GHG-CCI project, using the ALICE High Performance Computing Facility at the University of Leicester. The Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) is a network of ground-based Fourier transform spectrometers (FTSs) that record near-infrared (NIR) spectra of the sun. From these spectra, accurate and precise observations of CO2 column-averaged dry-air mole fractions (denoted XCO2) are retrieved. TCCON FTS observations have previously been used to validate satellite estimations of XCO2; however, our knowledge of the short-term spatial and temporal variations in XCO2 surrounding the TCCON sites is limited. In this work, we use the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) Eulerian three-dimensional transport model and the FLEXPART (FLEXible PARTicle dispersion model) Lagrangian particle dispersion model (LPDM) to determine the footprints of short-term variations in XCO2 observed by operational, past, future and possible TCCON sites. We propose a footprint-based method for the collocation of satellite and TCCON XCO2 observations and estimate the performance of the method using the NIES model and five GOSAT (Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite) XCO2 product data sets. Comparison of the proposed approach with a standard geographic method shows a higher number of collocation points and an average bias reduction up to 0.15 ppm for a subset of 16 stations for the period from January 2010 to January 2014. Case studies of the Darwin and Reunion Island sites reveal that when the footprint area is rather curved, non-uniform and significantly different from a geographical rectangular area, the differences between these approaches are more noticeable. This emphasises that the collocation is sensitive to local meteorological conditions and flux distributions. Peer-reviewed Publisher Version