Mean European Carbon Sink Over 2010–2015 Estimated by Simultaneous...

Scholze, M., T. Kaminski, W. Knorr, M. Voßbeck, M. Wu, P. Ferrazzoli, Y. Kerr, A. Mialon, P. Richaume, N. Rodríguez-Fernández, C. Vittucci, J.-P. Wigneron, S. Mecklenburg, and M. Drusch (2020), Mean European Carbon Sink Over 2010–2015 Estimated by Simultaneous Assimilation of Atmospheric CO2 , Soil Moisture, and Vegetation Optical Depth, Geophys. Res. Lett., 46, doi:10.1029/2019GL085725.
Abstract: 

The northern land biosphere is believed to be the main global sink of CO2 , but the contribution of Europe is uncertain. While bottom-up estimates and inverse atmospheric transport studies based on atmospheric CO2 observed in situ or from space by OCO-2 point to a moderate rate of uptake, some other inversions based on remotely sensed atmospheric CO2 from GOSAT/SCIAMACHY and biomass estimates from passive microwave satellite data point to a large sink of around 1 Gt C/yr. We present results from combining both approaches in a data assimilation framework, inverting a biosphere model against in situ atmospheric CO2 and passive microwave measurements. When assimilating all observations, we estimate a European carbon sink of 0.303 ± 0.083 Gt C/yr for 2010–2015. The result agrees with other bottom-up studies and atmospheric inversions using in situ CO2 or OCO-2 observations pointing to potential data problems when using observations from GOSAT or SCIAMACHY to estimate the European CO2 sink.

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Mission: 
Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2)