A decadal inversion of CO2 using the Global Eulerian–Lagrangian Coupled Atmospheric model (GELCA): sensitivity to the ground-based observation network

AbstractWe present an assimilation system for atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) using a Global Eulerian–Lagrangian Coupled Atmospheric model (GELCA), and demonstrate its capability to capture the observed atmospheric CO2 mixing ratios and to estimate CO2 fluxes. With the efficient data handling scheme in GELCA, our system assimilates non-smoothed CO2 data from observational data products such as the Observation Package (ObsPack) data products as constraints on surface fluxes. We conducted sensitivity tests to examine the impact of the site selections and the prior uncertainty settings of observation on the inversion results. For these sensitivity tests, we made five different site/data selections from the ObsPack product. In all cases, the time series of the global net CO2 flux to the atmosphere stayed close to values calculated from the growth rate of the observed global mean atmospheric CO2 mixing ratio. At regional scales, estimated seasonal CO2 fluxes were altered, depending on the CO2 data selected fo...