Greenhouse gas column observations from a portable spectrometer in Uganda

Abstract. The extensive terrestrial ecosystems of tropical Africa are a significant store of carbon and play a key but uncertain role in the atmospheric budgets of carbon dioxide and methane. As ground-based observations in the tropics are scarce compared with other parts of the world, recent studies have instead made use of satellite observations assimilated into atmospheric chemistry and transport models to conclude that methane emissions from this geographical region have increased since 2010 as a result of increased wetland extent, accounting for up to a third of global methane growth, and that the tropical Africa region dominates net carbon emission across the tropics. These studies critically rely on the accuracy of satellite datasets, such as those from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), the Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT), and the Sentinel-5 Precursor TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI), along with results from atmospheric transport models, over a geographical region where there are little independent data to test the robustness of published results. In this paper we present the first ground-based observations of greenhouse gas column concentrations over East Africa, obtained using a portable Bruker EM27/SUN Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer during a deployment covering the first few months of 2020 in Jinja, Uganda. We operated the instrument near autonomously by way of an automated weatherproof enclosure and observed total atmospheric column concentrations of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, as well as carbon monoxide, a useful proxy for emissions from incomplete combustion processes in the region. We discuss the performance of the combined enclosure and spectrometer system that we deployed in Jinja to obtain these data and show comparisons of our ground-based observations with satellite datasets from OCO-2 and Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 (OCO-3) for carbon dioxide and TROPOMI for methane and carbon monoxide, whilst also comparing our results with concentration data from the GEOS-Chem and Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) atmospheric inversions that provide a means of increasing spatial and temporal coverage where satellite data are not available. For our measurement period, we find mean differences in XCO2 between OCO-2 and the EM27/SUN of −0.29 % and between OCO-3 and the EM27/SUN of −0.28 %. In the case of TROPOMI, the mean difference in XCH4 that we find between TROPOMI and the EM27/SUN is −0.44 %, whilst for XCO the mean difference is −5.65 %. In each of these cases, the mean difference observed between the satellite and ground-based column concentrations is either close to or within the precision and accuracy requirements for the respective missions. With regard to the model and reanalysis comparisons with the EM27/SUN column concentrations, we see mean differences from the EM27/SUN of a global GEOS-Chem inversion for XCO2 of −0.08 %, a regional high-resolution GEOS-Chem inversion for XCH4 of −0.22 %, and the CAMS global reanalysis for XCO of −9.79 %. Our results demonstrate the value of ground-based observations of total column concentrations and show that the combined EM27/SUN and enclosure system employed would be suitable for acquisition of the longer-term observations needed to rigorously evaluate satellite observations and model and reanalysis calculations over tropical Africa.