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The contribution of AIRS data to the estimation of CO 2 sources and sinks
Author(s) -
Chevallier Frédéric,
Engelen Richard J.,
Peylin Philippe
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2005gl024229
Subject(s) - troposphere , radiance , atmospheric infrared sounder , environmental science , inversion (geology) , atmospheric sciences , mixing ratio , meteorology , remote sensing , geology , physics , paleontology , structural basin
The analysis of radiance measurements from the Atmospheric Infra‐Red Sounder (AIRS) has been providing the first global maps of CO 2 concentrations in the cloud‐free upper troposphere. This paper explores the usefulness of this data for the estimation of CO 2 surface fluxes. It appears that atmospheric mixing makes the upper tropospheric CO 2 concentrations rather zonal, which indicates that AIRS data inform about very broad features of the surface fluxes only. Further, such a small variability imposes a stringent constraint on the size of retrieval biases and of transport model biases for the estimation of CO 2 surface fluxes. We show that latitude‐dependent biases larger than a few tenths of a particle per million (ppm), at least south of 25°N, would harm the inversions. Significant improvements to the concentration retrieval algorithms and to the transport models are a prerequisite for the inversion of surface fluxes from AIRS.