Quantifying the benefit of A-SCOPE data for reducing uncertainties in terrestrial carbon fluxes in CCDAS

Abstract

ESA’s Earth Explorer candidate mission A-SCOPE aims at observing CO₂ from space with an active LIDAR instrument. This study employs quantitative network design techniques to investigate the benefit of A-SCOPE observations in a Carbon Cycle Data Assimilation System. The system links the observations to the terrestrial vegetation model BETHY via the fine resolution version of the atmospheric transport model TM3. In the modelling process chain the observations are used to reduce uncertainties in the values of BETHY’s process parameters, and then the uncertainty in the process parameters is mapped forward to uncertainties in both in long-term net carbon flux and net primary productivity over three regions. A-SCOPE yields considerably better reductions in posterior uncertainties than the ground-based GLOBALVIEW station network. This is true for assimilating monthly mean values and instantaneous values, and it is true for two potential vertical weighting functions. The strength of the constraint through A-SCOPE observations is high over the range of observational uncertainties.