Combining XCO2 measurements derived from SCIAMACHY and GOSAT for potentially generating global CO2 maps with high spatiotemporal resolution

PLoS One. 2014 Aug 13;9(8):e105050. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0105050. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Global warming induced by atmospheric CO2 has attracted increasing attention of researchers all over the world. Although space-based technology provides the ability to map atmospheric CO2 globally, the number of valid CO2 measurements is generally limited for certain instruments owing to the presence of clouds, which in turn constrain the studies of global CO2 sources and sinks. Thus, it is a potentially promising work to combine the currently available CO2 measurements. In this study, a strategy for fusing SCIAMACHY and GOSAT CO2 measurements is proposed by fully considering the CO2 global bias, averaging kernel, and spatiotemporal variations as well as the CO2 retrieval errors. Based on this method, a global CO2 map with certain UTC time can also be generated by employing the pattern of the CO2 daily cycle reflected by Carbon Tracker (CT) data. The results reveal that relative to GOSAT, the global spatial coverage of the combined CO2 map increased by 41.3% and 47.7% on a daily and monthly scale, respectively, and even higher when compared with that relative to SCIAMACHY. The findings in this paper prove the effectiveness of the combination method in supporting the generation of global full-coverage XCO2 maps with higher temporal and spatial sampling by jointly using these two space-based XCO2 datasets.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Atmosphere / analysis*
  • Carbon Dioxide / analysis*
  • Carbon Footprint*
  • Environmental Monitoring / methods*
  • Global Warming
  • Greenhouse Effect

Substances

  • Carbon Dioxide

Grants and funding

The work described in this paper has been jointly supported by project of “Climate Change: Carbon Budget and Related Issues” (Grant nr. XDA05040402) from Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the CAS/SAFEA International Partnership Program for Creative Research Teams (Grant nr. KZZD-EW-TZ-09) and National Natural Science foundation of China (Grant nr. 41301177). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.