Land Carbon Monitoring

Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change must deliver annual greenhouse gas inventories from 1990 onwards. The land surface models used in climate models and the data assimilation techniques used in meteorology have the potential to assess the impact of weather and climate variability on terrestrial biospheric carbon fluxes.

The Land Carbon Service aims to set up pre-operational infrastructures for providing global and regional (France, Hungary, the Netherlands) variables related to the terrestrial carbon cycle, in near-real-time (NRT), for describing the continental vegetation state (leaf area index and biomass), the surface fluxes (carbon and water), and the associated soil moisture. These variables are produced daily by models able to assimilate satellite data. This land data assimilation system is being implemented gradually. Past time series of observations, associated to atmospheric re-analysis, serve as a reference climatology for the NRT products. Combining these bottom-up to the top-down carbon flux estimates (the latter are produced by the GMES atmospheric service) reduce the uncertainties in the quantification of terrestrial biospheric sinks and sources of carbon.

• Monitoring of terrestrial biospheric fluxes of carbon and water at the global scale;
• Full use of observations in a land data assimilation system;
• Link to the GMES Atmospheric Core Service.

For further details please consult the Land Carbon Service flyer (1,2 MB) or contact the Land Carbon team by Email.

The Land Carbon products and services are accessible on the geoland2 SDI Expert portal.