The link between observations of CO2 in the atmosphere and the exchange of CO2 at the Earth's surface is transport in the atmosphere: storm systems, cloud complexes, and weather of all sorts cause winds that transport CO2 around the world. As a result, local events like fires, forest growth, and ocean upwelling can have impacts at remote locations. To simulate the winds and the weather, CarbonTracker uses sophisticated numerical models that are driven by the daily weather forecasts from the specialized meteorological centers of the world. Since CO2 does not decay or react in the lower atmosphere, the influence of emissions and uptake in locations such as North America and Europe are ultimately seen in our measurements even at the South Pole! Getting the transport of CO2 just right is an enormous challenge, and costs us almost 90% of the computer resources for CarbonTracker. To represent the atmospheric transport, we use the Transport Model 5 (TM5). This is a community-supported model whose development is shared among many scientific groups with different areas of expertise. TM5 is used for many applications other than CarbonTracker, including forecasting air-quality, studying the dispersion of aerosols in the tropics, tracking biomass burning plumes, and predicting pollution levels that future generations might have to deal with.
2. Detailed Description
The winds which drive TM5 come from the European Center for Medium range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) operational forecast model. This
"parent" model currently runs with ~25 km horizontal resolution and 25
layers in the vertical.
The carbon dioxide levels predicted by
CarbonTracker do not feed back onto these predictions of winds.
In contrast to earlier verions of CarbonTracker, we currently use the convection fields directly from ECMWF (whereas before they were calculated using the Tiedtke convection scheme).
For use in TM5, the ECMWF meteorological data are preprocessed into
coarser grids. In CarbonTracker Europe, TM5 is run at a global 3x2
degrees resolution with nested regions over Europe (1x1
degrees) and North America (1x1 degree).
The grid over Europe is shown in
the figure. TM5 runs at an external time step of three hours, but due
to the symmetrical operator splitting and the refined resolution in
nested grids, processes at the finest scale are repeated every 10
minutes. The vertical resolution of TM5 in CarbonTracker Europe is 25 hybrid
sigma-pressure levels, unevenly spaced with more levels near the
surface. Approximate heights of the mid-levels (in meters, with a
surface pressure of 1012 hPa) are:
3. Further Reading
TM5 is a global model with two-way nested grids; regions for which
high-resolution simulations are desired can be nested in a coarser
grid spanning the global domain. The advantage to this approach is
that transport simulations can be performed with a regional focus
without the need for boundary conditions from other models. Further,
this approach allows measurements outside the "zoom" domain to
constrain regional fluxes in the data assimilation, and ensures that
regional estimates are consistent with global constraints. TM5 is
based on the predecessor model TM3, with improvements in the advection
scheme, vertical diffusion parameterization, and meteorological
preprocessing of the wind fields (Krol et al., 2005).
The model is developed and maintained jointly by the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht (IMAU, The Netherlands), the Joint Research Centre (JRC, Italy), the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI, The Netherlands), and NOAA ESRL (USA).
In
CarbonTracker, TM5 separately simulates advection, convection (deep
and shallow), and vertical diffusion in the planetary boundary layer
and free troposphere.
Level Height (m) Level Height (m)
1 34.5 14 9076.6
2 111.9 15 10533.3
3 256.9 16 12108.3
4 490.4 17 13874.2
5 826.4 18 15860.1
6 1274.1 19 18093.2
7 1839.0 20 20590.0
8 2524.0 21 24247.3
9 3329.9 22 29859.6
10 4255.6 23 35695.0
11 5298.5 24 42551.5
12 6453.8 25 80000.0
13 7715.4