The capabilities of the adjoint of GEOS-Chem model to support HEMCO emission inventories and MERRA-2 meteorological data

Abstract. The adjoint of the GEOS-Chem (Goddard Earth Observing System with Chemistry) model has been widely used to constrain the sources of atmospheric compositions. Here, we designed a new framework to facilitate emission inventory updates in the adjoint of the GEOS-Chem model. The major advantage of this new framework is good readability and extensibility, which allows us to support Harmonized Emissions Component (HEMCO) emission inventories conveniently and to easily add more emission inventories following future updates in GEOS-Chem forward simulations. Furthermore, we developed new modules to support MERRA-2 (Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, version 2) meteorological data, which allows us to perform long-term analyses with consistent meteorological data for the period 1979–present. The performances of the developed capabilities were evaluated with the following steps: (1) diagnostic outputs of carbon monoxide (CO) sources and sinks to ensure the correct reading and use of emission inventories, (2) forward simulations to compare the modeled surface and column CO concentrations among various model versions, (3) backward simulations to compare adjoint gradients of global CO concentrations to CO emissions with finite-difference gradients, and (4) observing system simulation experiments (OSSEs) to evaluate the model performance in 4D variational (4D-Var) assimilations. Finally, an example application of 4D-Var assimilation was presented to constrain anthropogenic CO emissions in 2015 by assimilating Measurement of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT) CO observations. The capabilities developed in this work are important for better applications of the adjoint of the GEOS-Chem model in the future. These capabilities will be submitted to the standard GEOS-Chem adjoint code base for better development of the community of the adjoint of the GEOS-Chem model.