The upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS) is characterized by strong gradients in the distribution of long-lived tracers, which are sensitive to discrepancies in transport in models. We found that our model overestimates CO2 in the polar UTLS through comparison of modeled CO2 with aircraft observations. We then corrected the modeled CO2 and quantified the impact of the correction on the flux estimates using an atmospheric model together with atmospheric CO2 measured from a satellite.