Articles | Volume 15, issue 19
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-15-11133-2015
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-15-11133-2015
Research article
 | 
07 Oct 2015
Research article |  | 07 Oct 2015

On the statistical optimality of CO2 atmospheric inversions assimilating CO2 column retrievals

F. Chevallier

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AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision
AR by Frederic Chevallier on behalf of the Authors (09 Jul 2015)  Author's response   Manuscript 
ED: Reconsider after minor revisions (Editor review) (21 Sep 2015) by Mathias Palm
AR by Frederic Chevallier on behalf of the Authors (21 Sep 2015)  Author's response   Manuscript 
ED: Publish as is (22 Sep 2015) by Mathias Palm
AR by Frederic Chevallier on behalf of the Authors (25 Sep 2015)
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Short summary
We demonstrate that the current two-step approach to infer the CO2 surface fluxes from satellite measured radiances, with CO2 retrievals as an intermediate product, is not optimal. This suboptimality corrupts the 4D information flow from the radiance measurements to the surface flux estimates. It is amplified by current retrieval strategies where prior errors are much larger than the performance of prior CO2 simulations used in atmospheric inversions.
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