[1] We present estimates of the surface sources and sinks of CO 2 for 1992-2005 deduced from atmospheric inversions. We use atmospheric CO 2 records from 67 sites and 10 d 13 CO 2 records. We use two atmospheric models to increase the robustness of the results. The results suggest that interannual variability is dominated by the tropical land. Statistically significant variability in the tropical Pacific supports recent ocean modeling studies in that region. The northern land also shows significant variability. In particular, there is a large positive anomaly in 2003 in north Asia, which we associate with anomalous biomass burning. Results using d 13 CO 2 and CO 2 are statistically consistent with those using only CO 2 , suggesting that it is valid to use both types of data together. An objective analysis of residuals suggests that our treatment of uncertainties in CO 2 is conservative, while those for d 13 CO 2 are optimistic, highlighting problems in our simple isotope model. Finally, d 13 CO 2 measurements offer a good constraint to nearby land regions, suggesting an ongoing value in these measurements for studies of interannual variability.

Abstract. The Hudson Bay Lowlands (HBL) is the second largest boreal wetland ecosystem in the world and an important natural source of global atmospheric methane. We quantify the HBL methane emissions by using the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model to simulate aircraft measurements over the HBL from the ARCTAS and pre-HIPPO campaigns in May-July 2008, together with continuous 2004-2008 surface observations at Fraserdale (southern edge of HBL) and Alert (Arctic background). The difference in methane concentrations between Fraserdale and Alert is shown to be a good indicator of HBL emissions, and implies a sharp seasonal onset of emissions in late May (consistent with the aircraft data), a peak in July-August, and a seasonal shut-off in September. The model, in which seasonal variation of emission is mainly driven by surface temperature, reproduces well the observations in summer but its seasonal shoulders are too broad. We suggest that this reflects the suppression of emissions by snow cover and greatly improve the model simulation by accounting for this effect. Our resulting best estimate for HBL methane emissions is 2.3 Tg a −1 , several-fold higher than previous estimates Worthy et al., 2000).