Evaluation and comparison of atmospheric CO2 concentrations from models and satellite retrievals

Abstract

In recent years, global warming caused by increased atmospheric CO2 has greatly drawn widespread attention from the public. Although satellite observations and model-simulation offer us two effective approaches to monitor and assess the global atmospheric CO2, quantification of the differences between these two different CO2 data is not fully investigated yet. In this paper, these CO2 products including satellite observations and model-simulation are inter-compared in terms of magnitude and their spatiotemporal distributions. The results reveal that these CO2 data from different data source show a good agreement all over the world, whereas many discrepancies still exist between satellite observations and model-simulation, especially in the Northern Sphere.