Benefits and challenges associated with the use of satellite observations of CO2 for estimating surface CO2 sources and sinks

The use of ground-based measurements of atmospheric CO2 for the estimation of CO2 surface fluxes by inverse modeling has been an active area of research for over two decades. However, the availability of satellite observations of CO2 in recent years offers the potential to better constrain CO2 fluxes and improve our understanding of the carbon cycle. Two key benefits of employing CO2 satellite observations for flux estimation include better global coverage and reduced representativeness errors, while current challenges include cloud cover, retrieval biases, lower precision than in situ data, and issues related to surface sensitivity and vertical resolution. Examples and new results using CO2 observations from the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT) and other current missions will be described, along with a brief discussion of future directions.