The Airborne Carbon in the Mountains Experiment

Mountain landscapes of the Western US contain a significant portion of the North American carbon sink. This results from the land use history of the region, which has a preponderance of potentially aggrading mid-aged stands. The issue is significant not only because of the significant sink but because of the vulnerability of that sink to drought, insects, wildfire and other ecological changes occurring rapidly in the West. Quantification of the carbon budgets of western forests have received relatively limited attention, in part because direct carbon flux measurements are believed to be difficult to apply in complex landscapes. New techniques that take advantage of organized nighttime drainage flows may allow quantification of respiration on scales inaccessible in level landscapes, while Lagrangian airborne measurements may allow daytime fluxes to be quantified. Airborne and ground-based measurements during the summer of 2004 in Colorado show substantial drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide during the day and strong enrichment of the nocturnal boundary layer from nighttime respiration. We present a strategy whereby in situ measurements at multiple scales, remote sensing and data assimilation may be used to quantify carbon dynamics in mountain landscapes. Larger scales of integration may be possible in mountainous than level landscapes because of the integrative flow of air and water, while because of high heterogeneity, scaling from detailed local process studies remains difficult.