A53H-05
OCO-2 observations of Africa fire CO2 emissions
Friday, 18 December 2015: 14:40
3012 (Moscone West)
A. Anthony Bloom1, John R Worden2, Annmarie Eldering3, Helen Marie Worden4, Junjie Liu3, Zhe Jiang5, Meemong Lee3 and Kevin W Bowman5, (1)Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, (2)NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, (3)NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States, (4)National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, United States, (5)Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States
Abstract:
Fires play a major role in the terrestrial biosphere and the global carbon budget. African fires account for roughly 50% of global fire carbon (C) fluxes, largely emitted into the atmosphere as CO2 and CO. Major savanna and grassland fire events during the OCO-2 era provide ideal case studies for testing current understanding of African fire C emissions. We use MOPITT CO to characterize the role of fire CO2 enhancements in OCO-2 CO2 measurements during September-October 2014. We constrain the combustion efficiency of southern Africa fires by retrieving CO2:CO total dry-column CO2 concentrations from OCO-2 and MOPITT total dry-column CO. We also performed a benchmark OSSE, based on the CMS-Flux atmospheric transport and chemistry analysis of CO2 and CO. We find that OCO-2 MOPITT CO2:CO (1:30) are almost a factor of 2 higher than the OSSE true and retrieved CO2:CO values (1:18 and 1:16). Our findings indicate that southern Africa fire CO2:CO values are higher than previously assumed. We hypothesize that the higher-than-expected CO2:CO values are due to fire fuel dryness and composition. We anticipate that CO2:CO observations will provide an important global constraint on the estimation and attribution of continental-scale CO2 fluxes and on the processes controlling fire C emission variability.
