Assessing filtering of mountaintop COâ mole fractions for application to inverse models of biosphere-atmosphere carbon exchange
There is a widely recognized need to improve our understanding of biosphere-atmosphere carbon exchanges in areas of complex terrain including the United States Mountain West. COâ fluxes over mountainous terrain are often difficult to measure due to unusual and complicated influences associated with atmospheric transport. Consequently, deriving regional fluxes in mountain regions with carbon cycle inversion of atmospheric COâ mole fraction is sensitive to filtering of observations to those that can be represented at the transport model resolution. Using five years of COâ mole fraction observations from the Regional Atmospheric Continuous COâ Network in the Rocky Mountains (Rocky RACCOON), five statistical filters are used to investigate a range of approaches for identifying regionally representative COâ mole fractions. Test results from three filters indicate that subsets based on short-term variance and local COâ gradients across tower inlet heights retain nine-tenths of the total observations and are able to define representative diel variability and seasonal cycles even for difficult-to-model sites where the influence of local fluxes is much larger than regional mole fraction variations. Test results from two other filters that consider measurements from previous and following days using spline fitting or sliding windows are overly selective. Case study examples showed that these windowing-filters rejected measurements representing synoptic changes in COâ, which suggests that they are not well suited to filtering continental COâ measurements. We present a novel COâ lapse rate filter that uses COâ differences between levels in the model atmosphere to select subsets of site measurements that are representative on model scales. Our new filtering techniques provide guidance for novel approaches to assimilating mountain-top COâ mole fractions in carbon cycle inverse models.
document
https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7qj7j0f
eng
geoscientificInformation
Text
publication
2016-01-01T00:00:00Z
publication
2012-02-22T00:00:00Z
Copyright Author(s) 2012. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
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