EU GEOLAND II Project at ECMWF

Project Objectives

The EU-funded GEOLAND2 project is carried out in the context of GMES, a joint initiative of European Commission (EC) and European Space Agency (ESA), which aims to build up a European capacity for Global Monitoring of Environment and Security.

The GEOLAND2 consortium, with 56 GEOLAND2 partners, has developed and demonstrated a range of reliable, affordable and cost efficient European geo-information services, based on available Earth Observation resources in combination with in-situ measurements, supporting the implementation of European directives and their national implementation, as well as European and International policies.

At ECMWF the GEOLAND2 project has developed an offline modelling and data assimilation prototype for land surface Carbon and Vegetation cycles.

• CTESSEL (Global land Carbon&LAI - Demo)

This has also evolved towards the introduction of the CTESSEL scheme in the operational suite and since the 15 of November 2011 (cycle labelled 37R3) the ECMWF Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) has been extended to include the Natural land carbon dioxide emissions. This is part of an an effort to move towards Integrated environmental modelling, and it has been achieved in the framework of GEOLAND2 and MACC cooperation preparing for the European GMES Services, soon expected to access the Initial Operation phase (GIO).

This step was made possible by the availability of high-quality observations shared by the PIs' Consortia (so far open-access data from FLUXNET, CEOP, SRNWP Consortia have been used) that allowed extensive testing and calibration for the parameterizations, and thanks to the support of natural land carbon and biomass expertise from our partners.

Land Carbon Dioxide emissions

Net Ecosystem Exchange (NEE):
The NEE is the net natural CO2 flux exchanged between the biosphere and the atmosphere as simulated by the CTESSEL scheme and constrained by the operational data assimilation system. This value is useful in Atmospheric simulations of CO2 concentration as it permits to simulate natural sources and sink of CO2 that together with ocean emission and anthropogenic emissions characterize the day-to-day variability in CO2. This is available in instantaneous values (FCO2NEE) and in accumulated values since the beginning of each forecast (ACO2NEE).

Gross Primary Production (GPP):
This quantity represent the CO2 fixed by the vegetation via the photosynthetic activity of the land biospheric component. This is available in instantaneous values (FCO2GPP) and in accumulated values since the beginning of each forecast (ACO2GPP).

Ecosystem Respiration (RECO):
This quantity represent the CO2 emitted by the soil via biogenic activity of the land biospheric component, including both the heterotrophic and autotrophic respirations. This is available in
instantaneous values (FCO2REC) and in accumulated since the beginning of the forecast (ACO2REC).

New fields extraction

There are in total 6 new output variables (related to instantaneous and accumulated CO2 fluxes as reported in table 228, parameters from 80 to 85, as reported in the table.

The esuite (exp=55) was running in parallel to the operational suite all summer. The output is available from 11 of May 2011 and it has now a new archiving frequency of 1 hour (up to 90 hours, then 3-hourly).

For users with access to the Meteorological Archival and Retrieval System (MARS) here an example of extraction:

# Retrieve the hourly land carbon dioxide emission fields from the MARS Archive
retrieve,
class = od,
stream = oper,
expver = 1, # Use exp 55 for dates 2011-05-11 to 2011-11-14
date = 2011-12-01,
time = 00:00:00,
levtype = sfc,
param =80.228/81.228/82.228/83.228/84.228/85.228,
type = fc

For other users the data access can be requested to ECMWF Data Services.