Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

The ability to reliably estimate CO₂ fluxes from current in situ atmospheric CO₂ measurements and future satellite CO₂ measurements is dependent on transport model performance at synoptic and shorter timescales. The TransCom continuous experiment was designed to evaluate the performance of forward transport model simulations at hourly, daily, and synoptic timescales, and we focus on the latter two in this paper. Twenty-five transport models or model variants submitted hourly time series of nine predetermined tracers (seven for CO₂) at 280 locations. We extracted synoptic-scale variability from daily averaged CO₂ time series using a digital filter and analyzed the results by comparing them to atmospheric measurements at 35 locations. The correlations between modeled and observed synoptic CO₂ variabilities were almost always largest with zero time lag and statistically significant for most models and most locations. Generally, the model results using diurnally varying land fluxes were closer to the observations compared to those obtained using monthly mean or daily average fluxes, and winter was often better simulated than summer. Model results at higher spatial resolution compared better with observations, mostly because these models were able to sample closer to the measurement site location. The amplitude and correlation of model-data variability is strongly model and season dependent. Overall similarity in modeled synoptic CO₂ variability suggests that the first-order transport mechanisms are fairly well parameterized in the models, and no clear distinction was found between the meteorological analyses in capturing the synoptic-scale dynamics. [References: 47]