Impact of drought on the CO2 atmospheric growth rate 2010-2012 from the NASA Carbon Monitoring System Flux (CMS-Flux) Project

The La Nina between 2011-2012 led to significant droughts in the US and Northeastern Brazil while the historic drought in Amazon in 2010 was caused in part by the historic central Pacific El Nino. In order to investigate the role of drought on the atmospheric CO2 growth rate, we use satellite observations of CO2 and CO to infer spatially resolved carbon fluxes and attribute those fluxes to combustion sources correlated with drought conditions. Solar induced fluorescence in turn is used to estimate the impact of drought on productivity and its relationship to total flux. Preliminary results indicate that carbon losses in Mexico are comparable to the total fossil fuel production for that region. These in turn played an important role in the acceleration of the atmospheric growth rate from 2011-2012. These results were enabled using the NASA Carbon Monitoring System Project (CMS-Flux), which is based upon a 4D-variational assimilation system that incorporates observationally-constrained "bottom-up" estimates from the Fossil Fuel Data Assimilation System (FFDAS), the ECCO2-­Darwin physical and biogeochemical adjoint ocean state estimation system, and CASA-GFED3 land-surface biogeochemical model.