Improving the joint estimation of CO2 and surface carbon fluxes using a Constrained Ensemble Kalman Filter in COLA (v1.0)

Abstract. Atmospheric inversion of carbon dioxide (CO2) measurements to understand carbon sources and sinks has made great progress over the last two decades. However, most of the studies, including four-dimension variational (4D-Var), Ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF), and Bayesian synthesis approaches, obtains directly only fluxes while CO2 concentration is derived with the forward model as post-analysis. Kang et al. (2012) used the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (LETKF) that updates the CO2, surface carbon fluxes (SCF), and meteorology field simultaneously. Following this track, a system with a short assimilation window and a long observation window was developed (Liu et al., 2019). However, this system faces the challenge of maintaining global carbon mass. To overcome this shortcoming, here we introduce a Constrained Ensemble Kalman Filter (CEnKF) approach to ensure the conservation of global CO2 mass. After a standard LETKF procedure, an additional assimilation process is applied to adjust CO2 at each model grid point and to ensure the consistency between the analysis and the first guess of global CO2 mass. In the context of observing system simulation experiments (OSSEs), we show that the CEnKF can significantly reduce the annual global SCF bias from ~0.2 gigaton to less than 0.06 gigaton by comparing between experiments with and without it. Moreover, the annual bias over most continental regions is also reduced. At the seasonal scale, the improved system reduced the flux root-mean-square error from priori to analysis by 48–90 %, depending on the continental region. Moreover, the 2015–2016 El Nino impact is well captured with anomalies mainly in the tropics.