Within the United Nationals Framework Convention on Climate Change, countries are continuing to negotiate emission reduction targets and exploring mitigation strategies best suited to their biophysical characteristics. One of the largest impediments to advance in this front is the lack of high quality estimates of GHG fluxes in and out of natural and managed ecosystems. In this project, we are proposing to undertake the most ambitious synthesis effort to date using global and regional datasets and model outputs to constrain the regional GHG budgets of South and Southeast Asia, where the source/sink balance of GHGs has large uncertainty.
During the first two years on the project, project team has present carbon (CO2 and CH4 sources and sinks from the South Asia region. Major carbon fluxes from terrestrial ecosystem, land-use change, riverine export, fossil fuel burning are estimated and compared with top-down atmospheric CO2 and CH4 inverse model estimates. In the year 3, we specifically target analysis of measurements from Comilla, Bangladesh, and use the dataset in advanced data assimilation and inversion systems currently being developed in RIGG/JAMSTEC. This analysis is also likely to include other in situ data collected by other organizations from the South and Southeast Asia region as well as the remote sensing observations of CO2 and CH4 (e.g., by the GOSAT and OCO satellites). A reassessment of the carbon budget for the two regions combined will be made.