Challenges in Scaling Up Greenhouse Gas Fluxes: Experience From the UK Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Feedbacks Program

The role of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in global climate change is now well recognized and there a clear need to measure emissions verify the efficacy mitigation measures. To this end, reliable estimates are needed GHG balance at national scale over long time periods, but these difficult make accurately. Because measurement techniques generally restricted relatively small spatial temporal scales, fundamental problem translating into long-term on regional scale. key challenge lies upscaling short-term, point observations estimate large-scale annual totals, quantify uncertainty associated with upscaling. Here, we review some approaches synthesize work recent UK Greenhouse Gas Emissions Feedbacks Program, which was designed identify address challenges. Approaches scaling included: instrumentation developments mean that near-continuous data sets can be produced larger coverage; geostatistical methods extrapolating domains, using information data; more rigorous statistical characterize longer scales; analytical estimating model aggregation error; enhanced C flux novel uses remote sensing calibrate process models for generating probabilistic estimates.