Articles | Volume 15, issue 19
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-15-11133-2015
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-15-11133-2015
Research article
 | 
07 Oct 2015
Research article |  | 07 Oct 2015

On the statistical optimality of CO2 atmospheric inversions assimilating CO2 column retrievals

F. Chevallier

Download

Interactive discussion

Status: closed
Status: closed
AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment
Printer-friendly Version - Printer-friendly version Supplement - Supplement

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision
AR by Frederic Chevallier on behalf of the Authors (09 Jul 2015)  Author's response    Manuscript
ED: Reconsider after minor revisions (Editor review) (21 Sep 2015) by Mathias Palm
AR by Frederic Chevallier on behalf of the Authors (21 Sep 2015)  Author's response    Manuscript
ED: Publish as is (22 Sep 2015) by Mathias Palm
Download

The requested paper has a corresponding corrigendum published. Please read the corrigendum first before downloading the article.

Short summary
We demonstrate that the current two-step approach to infer the CO2 surface fluxes from satellite measured radiances, with CO2 retrievals as an intermediate product, is not optimal. This suboptimality corrupts the 4D information flow from the radiance measurements to the surface flux estimates. It is amplified by current retrieval strategies where prior errors are much larger than the performance of prior CO2 simulations used in atmospheric inversions.
Altmetrics
Final-revised paper
Preprint