Assimilation of Carbonyl Sulfide (COS) fluxes within the adjoint-based data assimilation system–Nanjing University Carbon Assimilation System (NUCAS v1.0)

Modeling and predicting changes in the function and structure of the terrestrial biosphere and its feedbacks to climate change strongly depends on our ability to accurately represent interactions of the carbon and water cycles, and energy exchange. However, carbon fluxes, hydrological status and energy exchange simulated by process-based terrestrial ecosystem models are subject to significant uncertainties, largely due to the poorly calibrated parameters related to various processes. In this work, an adjoint-based data assimilation system (Nanjing University Carbon Assimilation System, NUCAS) was developed, which is capable of assimilating multiple observations to optimize process parameters of a satellite data driven ecosystem model–BEPS (Boreal Ecosystem Productivity Simulator). Data assimilation experiments were conducted to demonstrate the robustness and to investigate the feasibility and applicability of NUCAS on seven sites by assimilating the carbonyl sulfide (COS) fluxes, which were tightly related to the stomatal conductance and photosynthesis. Results showed that NUCAS is able to achieve a consistent fit to COS observations across various ecosystems. Comparing prior simulations with validation datasets, we found that the assimilation of COS can significantly improve the model performance in gross primary productivity, sensible heat, latent heat and even soil moisture. We also showed that the NUCAS is capable of constraining parameters from multiple sites simultaneously and achieving a good consistency to the single-site assimilation. Our results demonstrate that COS can provide strong constraints on parameters relevant to water, energy and carbon processes with the data assimilation system, and open new perspectives for better understanding of the ecosystem carbon, water and energy exchanges.