Identification of spikes in continuous ground-based in-situ time series of CO2, CH4 and CO: an extended experiment within the European ICOS-Atmosphere Network

Autor: Cristofanelli, Paolo, Fratticioli, Cosimo, Hazan, Lynn, Chariot, Mali, Couret, Cedric, Gazetas, Orestis, Kubistin, Dagmar, Laitinen, Antti, Leskinen, Ari, Laurila, Tuomas, Lindauer, Matthias, Manca, Giovanni, Ramonet, Michel, Trisolino, Pamela, Steinbacher, Martin
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2023
ISSN: 1867-8548
Popis: The identification of spikes (i.e. short and high variability in the measured signals due to very local emissions occurring in the proximity of a measurement site) is of interest when using continuous measurements of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) in different applications like the determination of long-term trends and/or spatial gradients, the inversion experiments devoted to the top-down quantification of GHG surface-atmosphere fluxes, the characterization of local emissions or the quality control of GHG measurements. In this work, we analysed the results provided by two automatic spike identification methods (i.e. the standard deviation of the background - SD and the robust extraction of baseline signal - REBS) for a 2-year dataset of 1-minute in-situ observations of CO2, CH4 and CO at ten different atmospheric sites spanning different environmental conditions (remote, continental, urban). The sensitivity of the spike detection frequency and its impact on the averaged mole fractions on method parameters was investigated. Results for both methods were compared and evaluated against manual identification of the site Principal Investigators (PIs). The study showed that, for CO2 and CH4, REBS identified a larger number of spikes than SD and it was less “site-sensitive” than SD. This led to a larger impact of REBS on the time-averaged values of the observed mole fractions for CO2 and CH4. Further, it could be shown that it is challenging to identify one common algorithm/configuration for all the considered sites: method-dependent and setting-dependent differences in the spike detection were observed as a function of the sites, case studies and considered atmospheric species. Neither SD nor REBS appeared to provide a perfect identification of the spike events. The REBS tendency to over-detect the spike occurrence shows limitations when adopting REBS as an operational method to perform automatic spike detection. REBS should be used only for specific sites, mostly affected by frequent very nearby local emissions. SD appeared to be more selective in identifying spike events and the temporal variabilities of CO2, CH4 and CO were more consistent with that of the original datasets. Further activities are needed for better consolidating the fitness for purposes of the two proposed methods and to compare them with other spike detection techniques.
Databáze: OpenAIRE