ACPD Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions ACPD 1680-7375 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/acpd-9-23187-2009 Technical Note: A new coupled system for global-to-regional downscaling of CO<sub>2</sub> concentration estimation Trusilova K. 1 Rödenbeck C. 1 Gerbig C. 1 Heimann M. 1 Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Hans-Knoell Str. 10, 07745 Jena, Germany 02 11 2009 9 6 23187 23210 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/9/23187/2009/acpd-9-23187-2009.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/9/23187/2009/acpd-9-23187-2009.pdf

We introduce a global-to-regional nesting scheme for atmospheric transport models that are used for simulating concentrations of green house gases from globally distributed surface fluxes. The coupled system of the regional Stochastic Time-Inverted Lagrangian Transport (STILT) model and the global atmospheric transport model (TM3) is designed to resolve atmospheric trace gas concentrations at high temporal and spatial resolutions in a specified domain e.g. for regional inverse applications. The nesting technique used for the coupling is based on a decomposition of the atmospheric concentration signal into a far-field and a near-field contribution that allows global and regional models being of different type, i.e. Eulerian (grid) and Lagrangian (trajectory). For illustrating the performance of the coupled TM3-STILT system we compare simulated mixing ratios of carbon dioxide with available observations at 10 sites in Europe. For all chosen sites the TM3-STILT provided higher correlations between the modelled and the measured time series than the TM3 global model. The autocorrelation analysis showed that in contrast to the global model TM3-STILT model is capable to represent the variability of the measured tracer concentrations.

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