PNNL

Abstract

This study systematically examines the regional uncertainties and biases in carbon dioxide (CO2) mole fractions from two of the state-of-the-art global analysis products, namely the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) real-time atmospheric analysis from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and the Carbon- Tracker Near-Real Time (CT-NRT) reanalysis from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, by evaluation against hundreds of hours of airborne in situ measurements from the summer 2016 and winter 2017 Atmospheric Carbon and Transport (ACT) { America eld campaigns. Both the CAMS and CT-NRT analyses agree reasonably well with the independent ACT-America airborne CO2 measurements in the free troposphere, with root-mean-square deviations (RMSDs) between analyses and observations generally between 1{2 ppm, but show considerably larger uncertainties in the atmospheric boundary layer where the RMSDs are as large as 10 ppm in the lowermost 500 m of the boundary layer. There are strong variations in accuracy and bias between seasons, and across three different sub-regions in the United States (Mid-Atlantic, Midwest and South), with the largest uncertainties in the Mid-Atlantic region in summer. Overall, the RMSDs of the CAMS and CT-NRT analyses against airborne data are comparable to each other, and grossly consistent with the difference between the two analyses. The current study provides uncertainty estimates for both analysis products over North America and suggests that these two independent estimates can be used to approximate regional CO2 analysis uncertainties. Both statistics are important in future studies in quantifying the uncertainties in regional CO2 mole fraction and flux estimates.