The influence of meteorological variables on CO2 and CH4 trends recorded at a semi-natural station

Abstract

CO2 and CH4 evolution is usually linked with sources, sinks and their changes. However, this study highlights the role of meteorological variables. It aims to quantify their contribution to the trend of these greenhouse gases and to determine which contribute most. Six years of measurements at a semi-natural site in northern Spain were considered. Three sections are established: the first focuses on monthly deciles, the second explores the relationship between pairs of meteorological variables, and the third investigates the relationship between meteorological variables and changes in CO2 and CH4. In the first section, monthly outliers were more marked for CO2 than for CH4. The evolution of monthly deciles was fitted to three simple expressions, linear, quadratic and exponential. The linear and exponential are similar, whereas the quadratic evolution is the most flexible since it provided a variable rate of concentration change and a better fit. With this last evolution, a decrease in the change rate was observed for low CO2 deciles, whereas an increasing change rate prevailed for the rest and was more accentuated for CH4. In the second section, meteorological variables were provided by a trajectory model. Backward trajectories from 1-day prior to reaching the measurement site were used to calculate distance and direction averages as well as the recirculation factor. Terciles of these variables were determined in order to establish three intervals with low, medium and high values. These intervals were used to classify the variables following their interval widths and skewnesses. The best correlation between pairs of meteorological variables was observed for the average distance, in particular with horizontal wind speed. Sinusoidal relationships with the average direction were obtained for average distance and for vertical wind speed. Finally, in the third section, the quadratic evolution was considered in each interval of all the meteorological variables. As regards the main result, the greatest increases were obtained for high potential temperature for both gases followed by low and medium boundary layer height for CO2 and CH4, respectively. Combining both meteorological variables provided increases of 22 ± 9 and 0.070 ± 0.019 ppm for CO2 and CH4, respectively, although the number of observations affected is small, around 7%.