Applying Atmospheric Measurements to Constrain Parameters of Terrestrial Source Models

Quantitative inversions of atmospheric measurements have been widely applied to constrain atmospheric budgets of a range of trace gases. Experiments of this type have revealed persistent discrepancies between 'bottom-up' and 'top-down' estimates of source magnitudes. The most common atmospheric inversion uses the absolute magnitude as the sole parameter for each source, and returns the optimal value of that parameter. In order for atmospheric measurements to be useful for improving 'bottom-up' models of terrestrial sources, information about other properties of the sources must be extracted. As the density and quality of atmospheric trace gas measurements improve, examination of higher-order properties of trace gas sources should become possible. Our model of boreal forest fire emissions is parameterized to permit flexible examination of the key uncertainties in this source. Using output from this model together with the UM CTM, we examined the sensitivity of CO concentration measurements made by the MOPITT instrument to various uncertainties in the boreal source: geographic distribution of burned area, fire type (crown fires vs. surface fires), and fuel consumption in above-ground and ground-layer fuels. Our results indicate that carefully designed inversion experiments have the potential to help constrain not only the absolute magnitudes of terrestrial sources, but also the key uncertainties associated with 'bottom-up' estimates of those sources.