The zonal structure of tropical O<sub>3</sub> and CO as observed by the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer in November 2004 – Part 1: Inverse modeling of CO emissions

Abstract

Abstract. We conduct an inverse modeling analysis of measurements of atmospheric CO from the TES and MOPITT satellite instruments using the GEOS-Chem global chemical transport model to quantify emissions of CO in the tropics in November 2004. We also assess the consistency of the information provided by TES and MOPITT on surface emissions of CO. We focus on the tropics in November 2004, during the biomass burning season, because TES observations of CO and O 3 and MOPITT observations of CO reveal significantly greater abundances of these gases than simulated by the GEOS-Chem model during that period. We find that both datasets suggest substantially greater emissions of CO from sub-equatorial Africa and the Indonesian/Australian region than in the climatological emissions in the model. The a posteriori emissions from sub-equatorial Africa based on TES and MOPITT data were 173 Tg CO/yr and 184 Tg CO/yr, respectively, compared to the a priori of 95 Tg CO/yr. In the Indonesian/Australian region, the a posteriori emissions inferred from TES and MOPITT data were 155 Tg CO/yr and 185 Tg CO/yr, respectively, whereas the a priori was 69 Tg CO/yr. The differences between the a posteriori emission estimates obtained from the two datasets are generally less than 20%. The a posteriori emissions significantly improve the simulated distribution of CO, however, large regional residuals remain, and are likely due to systematic errors in the analysis. Reducing these residuals and Correspondence to: D. B. A. Jones (dbj@atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca) improving the accuracy of top-down emission estimates will require better characterization of systematic errors in the observations and the model (chemistry and transport).

Characterization of Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) CO<sub>2</sub> for carbon cycle science

“…We then use the pseudo-data to sequentially update and thus optimize the flux estimates, starting from an a priori estimate of the fluxes that is different from the truth. We use the maximum a posteriori (MAP) approach described in Jones et al (2003Jones et al ( , 2009, in which we minimize the following cost function…”

A Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer HDO/H<sub>2</sub>O retrieval simulator for climate models

“…This approach is based on the earlier, pre-Aura launch description of Jones et al (2003) of the potential accuracy of the TES CO retrievals. Variants of the technique have been used in validating TES retrievals against collocated measurements of CO from aircraft , O 3 from aircraft (Richards et al, 2008) and sondes , and H 2 O measurements from sondes .…”

The influence of boreal biomass burning emissions on the distribution of tropospheric ozone over North America and the North Atlantic during 2010

“…We use CO observations made by the Measurements Of Pollution In The Troposphere (MOPITT) instrument as they have been extensively used in inversions with GEOS-Chem in previous studies (e.g. Arellano et al, 2006;Fortems-Cheiney et al, 2009;Jones et al, 2009;Kopacz et al, 2009Kopacz et al, , 2010Gonzi et al, 2011;Jiang et al, 2011). The MOPITT instrument is a gas correlation radiometer, launched aboard the NASA EOS Terra satellite in December 1999.…”