Greenhouse gas column observations from a portable spectrometer in Uganda

作者：Neil Humpage, Hartmut Boesch, William Okello, Jia Chen, Florian Dietrich, Mark F. Lunt, Liang Feng, Paul I. Palmer, Frank Hase · 发表于：Atmospheric measurement techniques · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.5194/amt-17-5679-2024 · 被引用次数：6 · 研究领域：Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics、Climate variability and models、Science and Climate Studies

Abstract. The extensive terrestrial ecosystems of tropical Africa are a significant store of carbon and play a key but uncertain role in the atmospheric budgets of carbon dioxide and methane. As ground-based observations in the tropics are scarce compared with other parts of the world, recent studies have instead made use of satellite observations assimilated into atmospheric chemistry and transport models to conclude that methane emissions from this geographical region have increased since 2010 as a result of increased wetland extent, accounting for up to a third of global methane growth, and that the tropical Africa region dominates net carbon emission across the tropics. These studies critically rely on the accuracy of satellite datasets, such as those from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), the Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT), and the Sentinel-5 Precursor TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI), along with results from atmospheric transport models, over a geographical region where there are little independent data to test the robustness of published results. In this paper we present the first ground-based observations of greenhouse gas column concentrations over East Africa, obtained using a portable Bruker EM27/SUN Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer during a deployment covering the first few months of 2020 in Jinja, Uganda. We operated the instrument near autonomously by way of an automated weatherproof enclosure and observed total a...