Space- and ground-based CO2 measurements: A review

The climate warming is mainly due to the increase in concentrations of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, of which CO2 is the most important one responsible for radiative forcing of the climate. In order to reduce the great estimation uncertainty of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, several CO2-related satellites have been successfully launched and many future greenhouse gas monitoring missions are planned. In this paper, we review the development of CO2 retrieval algorithms, spatial interpolation methods and ground observations. The main findings include: 1) current CO2 retrieval algorithms only partially account for atmospheric scattering effects; 2) the accurate estimation of the vertical profile of greenhouse gas concentrations is a long-term challenge for remote sensing techniques; 3) ground-based observations are too sparse to accurately infer CO2 concentrations on regional scales; and 4) accuracy is the primary challenge of satellite estimation of CO2 concentrations. These findings, taken as a whole, point to the need to develop a high accuracy method for simulation of carbon sources and sinks on the basis of the fundamental theorem of Earth’s surface modelling, which is able to efficiently fuse space- and ground-based measurements on the one hand and work with atmospheric transport models on the other hand.