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Report on the complementarities of CARBONES
with other EU/National projects and outside Europe
Interaction with climate users and analysis of model requirements to achieve the desired
improvements and constraint on climate-carbon cycle modelling will allow us to draw on
expertise in other EU and national projects and to ensure that CARBONES provides benefit to
them also. Among the complementary projects that will have a synergy with CARBONES we can
distinguish:
Earth system model development, integration and validation

C4MIP/C5MIP (http://gaim.unh.edu/Structure/Future/MIPs/C4MIP.html)
The Coupled Climate Carbon Model Intercomparison Project is the international program
which organises the simulation protocols, feedback analysis and provides input to the IPCC.
Coordinated by P. Friedlingstein (LSCE) and P. Cox (U. Exeter), this programme will benefit
from the model optimization of CARBONES and use the CARBONES flux products to
calibrate other models used for future scenarios.

COMBINE (http://www.combineproject.org.uk/)
is an EU project to implement new components into ESMs. This will allow models to better
simulate observed carbon cycle changes and make more reliable projections of future changes
as they better represent the relevant processes. CARBONES will be able to provide essential
observational constraints to enable COMBINE development to optimally target and calibrate
the new ESM model components.

CLAMP (http://www.climatemodeling.org/c-lamp/)
The Carbon-Land Model intercomparison Project is a model-measurement intercomparison
to allow the international scientific community to evaluate the performance of
biogeochemical models normally coupled to general circulation models. CARBONES
reanalysis will be used in the project as a potential data-derived benchmark product to
validate the biogeochemical models.

National projects and efforts to develop Earth System models. The members of these
projects will be involved as users of the CARBONES products, through WP100.
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Carbon budgets at regional and continental scales

GhG-Europe (http://www.ghg-europe.eu; following CARBOEUROPE)
is an EU project which collects the observations necessary to quantify and understand the
carbon fluxes of the European continent, with a special focus on managed ecosystems. Data
from this project will be assimilated by the system developed in CARBONES, and the
resulting flux maps compared to data-oriented and sectoral model results.

CARBOOCEAN (http://www.carboocean.org)
is an EU project which collects observations necessary to quantify and understand the carbon
fluxes of the oceans, with a specific focus on North Atlantic and Southern Oceans. Pco2
ocean data from this project will be assimilated or used for validation by the system
developed in CARBONES, while the modelling results of CARBOOCEAN will be
compared to CARBONES ocean flux product.

CARBOAFRICA (http://www.carboafrica.net/)
is an EU-funded project dealing with a pilot observing system of flux towers and atmospheric
stations over the African continent, where too few in situ data are available. Data from this
project will be used to test the performances of the System over African ecosystems. This
project is followed by the ClimAfrica project (starting late 2010).

CarboExtreme (http://www.carbo-extreme.eu/)
is an EU project aimed at assessing the vulnerability of carbon storage to climate variability
and extremes. The CARBONES reanalysis will allow a large-scale assessment of such
extremes, to complement the CarboExtreme detailed observations and to put these into a
larger context (temporally and spatially).

NACP (http://www.nacarbon.org/nacp/)
The North American Carbon Program is a multidisciplinary program to measure and
understand the sources and sinks of Carbon Dioxide and other greenhouse gazes in North
America and adjacent ocean regions. The CARBONES project will benefit from atmospheric
CO2 measurements as well as ecosystem measurements of NACP (measurements directly
assimilated in the CARBONES model-data fusion system). The reanalysis of CARBONES
will be compared to similar carbon products derived within the NACP program (such as
CarbonTracker).
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GMES and monitoring infrastructures

MACC (http://www.gmes-atmosphere.eu/)
is the GMES Atmosphere Pilot Service. It includes a component for greenhouse gases and
relies on atmospheric measurements (mainly from space) to analyse their concentrations.
CARBONES is not limited in the type of data to be assimilated and these observations will
be used as well. The MACC carbon products will be compared to the CARBONES reference
products in a benchmarking exercise (WP600) to assess the benefit of using Ecosystem
measurements (Fluxnet data, Forest and Soil carbon stocks,… not used in MACC) for the
estimation of the carbon balance of terrestrial ecosystems.

GEOLAND-2 (http://www.gmes-geoland.info/)
is a GMES project that forms the backbone of a future GMES-land service element.
CARBONES will use the GEOLAND-2 satellite products in the assimilation system.
Photosynthesis and respiration fluxes demonstrators obtained by vegetation models in
GEOLAND-2 will be compared with the CARBONES reference products.

ICOS (http://www.icos-infrastructure.eu/)
is a Research Infrastructure developed to quantify the greenhouse gas budget of the
European continent over the next 20 years. It is in its Preparatory Phase and a network of 50
atmospheric stations and ecosystem long-term observation sites is being set up, using the
research experience gained in CARBOEUROPE and CARBOOCEAN. ICOS will benefit
immediately from the development of an operational system such as CARBONES allowing
to assimilate data routinely into maps of CO2 fluxes and their uncertainties. The first ICOS
measurement sites (>2010) will be included in CARBONES.
Carbon accounting projects

National inventories regularly reported to the United Nations FCC will benefit from the
‘full carbon accounting’ high-resolution flux products established in CARBONES.
Detection of discrepancies, natural sources and sinks not accounted for by national
inventories will in the long run help to improve the inventory methods.

Similarly, local and regional authorities aiming at estimating CO2 emissions will have
access through a friendly interface to CO2 flux products and uncertainties.
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ANNEX
Overall structure of the Carbon Cycle Data Assimilation System used in the CARBONES
project.
Figure: Diagram linking the components of the first version (V1) of the Carbon Cycle Data Assimilation System (CCDAS).
Orange boxes are for the parameters to be optimized, pink boxes for the observations to be assimilated, grey boxes for
the forcing data.
The variational optimization scheme relies on the minimization of a cost function J, comprising four terms.