The NACP implementation plan seeks to measure and understand the sources and sinks of CO2, CH4, and CO. The primary issue of both the magnitude and the possible mechanisms of the northern hemisphere terrestrial carbon sink have remained unsettled for well over a decade. At present there appears to be a big difference in present CO2 flux measurements between top-down and bottom-up comparisons. The goal of this meeting is to identify necessary and available data to:
1) provide a mass balance for net carbon fluxes during the intensive measurements to an accuracy of 10% over a large region.
2) enable significant improvements in the parameterization of transport/mixing processes in the lower atmosphere.
3) use the variance structure of the same data to enable design and implementation of an optimized and efficient system to monitor future regional carbon fluxes.
4) use a variety of 'bottom-up' techniques to enable significant improvements of measured data based on soil and vegetation characteristics and processes. These data sets will be tested and made applicable to larger landscapes by using models that include ecosystem, crop growth and process models. Eddy-covariance flux data, and spatially detailed satellite remote sensing estimates of a number of variables will also be used to estimate the net carbon fluxes over the same region.
5) investigating techniques for constructing carbon flux maps at various levels of spatial and temporal detail.
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Final meeting report submitted to NACP Steering Committee |