Fiscal Year 1998 Annual Report, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, World Data Center -- A for Atmospheric Trace Gases

Once again, the most recent fiscal year was a productive one for the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), as well as a year for change. The FY 1998 in Review section in this report summarizes quite a few new and updated data and information products, and the ''What's Coming in FY 1999'' section describes our plans for this new fiscal year. During FY 1998, CDIAC began a data-management system for AmeriFlux, a long-term study of carbon fluxes between the terrestrial biosphere of the Western Hemisphere and the atmosphere. The specific objectives of AmeriFlux are to establish an infrastructure for guiding, collecting, synthesizing, and disseminating long-term measurements of CO{sub 2}, water, and energy exchange from a variety of ecosystems; collect critical new information to help define the current global CO{sub 2} budget; enable improved predictions of future concentrations of atmospheric CO{sub 2}; and enhance understanding of carbon fluxes. Net Ecosystem Production (NEP), and carbon sequestration in the terrestrial biosphere. The data-management system, available from CDIAC'S AmeriFlux home page (http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/programs/ameriflux/ ) is intended to provide consistent, quality-assured, and documented data across all AmeriFlux sites in the US, Canada, Costa Rica, and Brazil. It is being developed by Antoinette Brenkert and Tom Boden, with assistance from Susan Holladay (who joined CDIAC specifically to support the AmeriFlux data-management effort).