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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Cited articles

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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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