Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere

Spring Cleaning: Updates from the CIRA Carbon Group

This overview presentation will discuss the exciting activities of the CIRA Carbon Group. Chris O’Dell presented an initial overview on Carbon Group activities in September 2023 focusing on retrievals and the remote sensing of greenhouse gases (GHG). In this talk, I’ll focus on how we use those satellite observations, in conjunction with other sources of GHG data such as those collected by our colleagues down the road in Boulder at NOAA-GML, to produce surface maps of estimated CO2 flux. While this source-receptor, or “flux inversion”, problem is largely linear in its basic form, we still deal with a number of hurdles that may be overlooked by NWP practitioners. We will also discuss new efforts to use hyperspectral imagery in the field to improve our knowledge of gross primary production (GPP), the carbon “sink” portion of the CO2 net balance at the surface. Lastly, we will give an overview of the efforts being taking by our community to educate the next generation of GHG/trace gas flux inversion modelers right here at CIRA!