Sun (CMS 2020): A High-Resolution Carbon Monitoring System for East Africa: Unifying Top-Down Atmospheric Inversion and Bottom-Up Next-Generation Vegetation-Soil Models and Observations
Ying Sun, Cornell University, ys776@cornell.edu (Presenter)
Following the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries worldwide are actively taking measures to mitigate climate change by reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions, which fundamentally altered the traditional practices for carbon monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV). This is particularly true in East Africa (EA), where large-scale land restoration programs have been actively pursued for sustainable development. These efforts can significantly reshape the dynamics and evolution of terrestrial carbon sources/sinks, yet considerable uncertainties exist regarding their magnitude and trajectories. Thus, there is a critical need for an accurate carbon monitoring system in EA that can be used to monitor carbon sinks/sources, verify climate impact, inform ongoing and future land and carbon management programs.
Here we propose to develop the first CMS prototype in EA that integrates “bottom-up” land model simulations constrained by multiple satellite observations and “top-down” carbon inversion to quantify carbon budgets at high spatial resolution. This project aims to provide carbon fluxes and storage products that can resolve the high spatial heterogeneity to inform policy making, together with thorough uncertainty assessments to ensure traceability, transparency and accountability. To achieve this, we have six interconnected tasks:
Task 1 (Bottom-up): Incorporate a mechanistically explicit microbial soil organic carbon model (SOMic) into the NCAR CLM to improve predictions of the transient response of below-ground carbon processes to changing environments and land management.
Task 2 (Bottom-up): Assimilate multiple satellite observations into the SOMic enabled CLM-DART to constrain the simulated carbon fluxes (both component and net fluxes) and storage (both above- and below-ground). SIF retrievals from GOSAT and OCO-2/3, MODIS LAI, and SMAP soil moisture will be primarily used.
Task 3 (Top-down): Develop high-resolution carbon inversion platform, CMS-Flux-Africa, to estimate regional-scale net biosphere exchange and biomass burning fluxes with satellite XCO2 observations from GOSAT and OCO-2/3, and XCO from MOPITT. The prior fluxes and uncertainty for CMS-Flux-Africa will come from CLM-DART (in Task 2).
Task 4 (Integrated bottom-up & top-down): Re-optimize carbon fluxes (component fluxes including GPP, NPP, autotrophic and heterotrophic respiration Ra, Rh) and carbon storage through constraints with posterior net biosphere exchanges and biomass burning fluxes from CMS-Flux-Africa (in Task 3).
Task 5: Quantify the uncertainty of the developed carbon fluxes and storage products from Task 4.
Task 6: Engage with stakeholders from government and non-profit organizations to utilize our developed products for MRVof their own land management programs.
Our proposed six interconnected tasks will enable the linkage of carbon dynamics from scales at which processes occur to scales at which decisions are made. The integrated bottom-up and top-down approach will maximize the power of the multiple satellite observational constraints, and significantly reduce uncertainty of carbon budget estimates. The developed carbon products will provide a direct contribution to inform national sustainable land management, REDD+ projects, and climate mitigation programs, managed by our partner stakeholders, the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change and Food Security. Thus this project will significantly contribute to the CMS program by: 1) advancing remote sensing-based approaches to quantifying forest degradation and forest regrowth, 2) advancing the use of satellite remote sensing as an alternative or a supplement to ground-based methods for quantifying net carbon emissions and/or storage, and 3) directly engaging with stakeholders from governmental institutions and non-profit research institutions in development and evaluation of CMS products.
Associated Project(s):
Poster Location ID: 41
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Poster Session 1
Session Date: Wednesday (9/27) 1:15 PM