A Bird's-Eye View of the Carbon Cycle: Spatiotemporal Tools for Constraining the CO2 Budget from Atmospheric Observations

• Activity Number: 619
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 8, 2013 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute
• Author(s): Anna M. Michalak*+
• Companies: Carnegie Inst. for Science
• Keywords: spatiotemporal analysis ; carbon dioxide ; climate ; inverse problem ; massive data

Abstract

Predicting future changes to the global carbon cycle (and therefore climate) and quantifying anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide both require an understanding of net carbon sources and sinks, and their variability, across a variety of spatial and temporal scales. This need highlights the importance of understanding the spatial and temporal scale-dependence of parameters controlling this variability, and developing methods for using data collected at multiple scales to infer carbon fluxes.

This presentation will describe ongoing work examining the carbon cycle from an atmospheric perspective in three major areas: spatiotemporal inverse modeling tools for characterizing uptake and emissions of carbon dioxide at the Earth surface using atmospheric observations of CO2; regression approaches for understanding the scale-dependence of processes controlling carbon flux variability; and mapping tools for massive datasets used for obtaining global atmospheric CO2 distributions from satellite observations.