Daily European CO2 fluxes inferred by inversion of atmospheric transport

Continuous measurements of atmospheric CO2 over continental areas offer the potential to better understand the carbon fluxes between the terrestrial biosphere and the atmosphere. Up to now, most atmospheric inversions have provided monthly fluxes averaged over large sub continental regions. Refining space and time resolution of European fluxes calculated by inversion of atmospheric transport requires i) continuous CO2 measurements over Europe, ii) a high resolution transport model that can reproduce the variability of CO2 over continents and provide continuous response functions at model resolution, and iii) an updated inverse procedure that can use the increased associated information. We use here continuous CO2 measurements obtained through AEROCARB EU project (part of CARBOEUROPE cluster) for year 1998 at 10 continental stations to retrieve daily fluxes over Europe at model resolution with LMDZ transport model. LMDZ model is a global transport model with zoom and back-transport capabilities. A zoom was defined over Europe, with 0.4° maximum resolution. Back transport is based on self-adjoint property of atmospheric transport that makes it possible to get model daily response functions at model resolution and at low computing cost. In this talk, we present the new features of the inverse procedure and we detail the LMDZ back transport. First results obtained for daily European fluxes of the two last months of 1998 are presented and analysed. The question of retrieving fossil emissions from continuous measurements is also developed.