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| CarbonTracker | |
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| Name | CarbonTracker |
CarbonTracker
CarbonTracker is a scientific project and modeling system for quantifying sources and sinks of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane using atmospheric observations, inverse modeling, and data assimilation. It supports research in climate science, ecosystem ecology, and atmospheric chemistry, informing policy dialogues, intergovernmental assessments, and national greenhouse gas inventories. CarbonTracker integrates observations from networks of observatories, aircraft campaigns, and satellite missions to produce gridded flux estimates and uncertainty metrics used by academic groups, agencies, and international assessment bodies.
CarbonTracker combines atmospheric transport models, inversion frameworks, and observational networks to estimate spatially and temporally resolved greenhouse gas fluxes. It serves stakeholders including research programs such as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and university centers like Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory. Outputs are used by initiatives such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment processes, the Global Carbon Project, and national reporting to treaty processes like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The project links to observational infrastructures including the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratories, the Integrated Carbon Observation System, and satellite missions managed by European Space Agency and NASA.
The core methodology uses Bayesian inverse modeling to adjust prior flux estimates with atmospheric mole fraction observations through data assimilation schemes. Transport of tracers is simulated with Eulerian and Lagrangian models such as the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office's systems or community models like WRF and GEOS-Chem to represent advection, convection, and boundary layer processes. Priors derive from terrestrial biosphere models including Community Land Model, fire and emission inventories like GFED and EDGAR, and ocean biogeochemistry models such as Biogeochemical Elemental Cycling frameworks. Optimization and state estimation employ statistical techniques linked to institutions like National Center for Atmospheric Research and methods used in variational and ensemble Kalman filter approaches.
CarbonTracker ingests measurements from surface stations, tall towers, air sampling networks, and remote sensing platforms. Key platforms include the Global Atmosphere Watch network, flask sampling from programs at Mauna Loa Observatory, aircraft campaigns run by NOAA Aircraft Operations Center and Atmospheric Tomography Mission, and satellite retrievals from missions like OCO-2, GOSAT, and Sentinel-5P. Instrument types include cavity ring-down spectrometers, gas chromatographs, and tunable diode laser spectrometers maintained by laboratories such as WMO Global Atmosphere Watch Central Calibration Laboratories. Ancillary datasets include meteorological reanalyses from ECMWF and NCEP and land cover data from initiatives like MODIS.
CarbonTracker products inform carbon budget assessments by the Global Carbon Project and contribute to sectoral analyses used in national inventory preparation under UNFCCC reporting. They support attribution studies in events such as major wildfires and urban emissions by linking modeled fluxes to observed enhancements at sites like Barrow Observatory and regional campaigns coordinated with European Research Council projects. Policy-relevant uses include monitoring progress toward commitments under mechanisms related to the Paris Agreement and supporting verification mechanisms developed in collaboration with Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development partners. Academic impacts include hundreds of peer-reviewed studies across journals like Nature, Science, and Journal of Geophysical Research.
Validation integrates independent datasets including aircraft transects, ocean carbon observations from programs such as GO-SHIP, and isotope measurements from laboratories like National Ocean Service facilities. Uncertainty assessment uses ensemble approaches, perturbation experiments, and comparison with alternative inversions produced by groups at University of Exeter, University of York, and MPIJ-style centers. Sensitivity analyses examine contributions from transport model error, prior flux specification, observation biases from instruments like cavity ring-down spectrometers, and representativeness errors linked to network density such as gaps in the Southern Ocean and high-latitude sites. Intercomparison projects coordinated by entities like the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry community help quantify methodological spread.
CarbonTracker originated from collaborations between national laboratories and universities in response to growing needs for observationally constrained carbon budgets during the early 2000s. It built on foundational work in atmospheric inversion pioneered at institutions including Scripps Institution of Oceanography and MPI for Meteorology. Development advanced alongside satellite missions such as GOSAT and OCO-2 and with expansion of surface networks coordinated by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the World Meteorological Organization. Iterative releases have incorporated improved biosphere models, assimilation frameworks, and expanded greenhouse gas species coverage informed by studies in journals like Geophysical Research Letters.
The project is sustained by collaborations among agencies and universities including NOAA, NASA, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Michigan, and international partners in Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency-linked programs. Funding sources have included national research agencies such as the National Science Foundation, programmatic support from Department of Energy, and European funding mechanisms like the Horizon 2020 framework. Partnerships extend to observational consortia such as the Integrated Carbon Observation System and to modeling communities coordinated by Coupled Model Intercomparison Project-related efforts.
Category:Carbon cycle Category:Climate change monitoring