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On the accuracy of the CO 2 surface fluxes to be estimated from the GOSAT observations
Author(s) -
Chevallier Frédéric,
Maksyutov Shamil,
Bousquet Philippe,
Bréon FrançoisMarie,
Saito Ryu,
Yoshida Yukio,
Yokota Tatsuya
Publication year - 2009
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 - 10.1029/2009gl040108
Subject(s) - environmental science , greenhouse gas , satellite , carbon flux , flux (metallurgy) , carbon cycle , tonne , atmospheric sciences , atmosphere (unit) , metric (unit) , scale (ratio) , climatology , remote sensing , meteorology , geology , oceanography , physics , ecology , materials science , operations management , quantum mechanics , astronomy , ecosystem , economics , metallurgy , biology , chemistry , organic chemistry
This paper quantifies the value added by the Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT) to numerical models of the global carbon cycle for the estimation of CO 2 surface fluxes. The metric used here is the theoretical uncertainty reduction, defined as one minus the ratio of the posterior flux uncertainty to the prior ones. Our results indicate that GOSAT should significantly improve our knowledge of the CO 2 surface fluxes over terrestrial vegetated areas, even at the scale of a week and of a few hundred kilometres. Over ocean and in spite of the GOSAT sun‐glint‐pointing capability, large improvements are seen only when the fluxes are aggregated both over ocean basins and over a year.