A description of the Carbonyl Sulfide (COS) budget inferred by inverse modelling

Carbonyle Sulphide, a trace gas exhibiting a striking similarity with CO2 in the biochemical diffusion path of leaves, has been recognized to be a promising surrogate of CO2 for estimating carbon storage in the terrestrial vegetation. Based on the similarity between COS and CO2, an empirical linear model relating both gas concentrations provides constraints on the estimation of the Gross Primary Productivity (GPP), the amount of carbon dioxide that is absorbed by ecosystems. However, large uncertainties on the other components of its atmospheric budget prevent us from directly relating the atmospheric COS measurements to the the GPP at global scale. The largest uncertainty arises from the closure of its atmospheric budget, with a source component missing. We explore here the benefit of assimilating both COS and CO2 measurements into the LMDz atmospheric transport model to gain insight on the COS budget. We develop an analytic inverse system which optimized the biospheric fluxes within the 14 Plant functional Type (PFTs) as defined in the ORCHIDEE land surface model. The vegetation uptake of COS is parameterized as a linear function of GPP and of the leaf relative uptake (LRU), which is the ratio of COS to CO2 deposition velocities in plants. A possible scenario leads to a global biospheric sink between 800-900 GgS/y, with a higher GPP in the high latitudes and higher total oceanic emissions between 400 and 600 GgS/y over the tropics. The COS inter-hemispheric gradient is in better agreement with HIPPO independent aircraft measurements. The comparison against NOAA COS airborne profiles and Solar Induced Fluorescence shed light on a too strong GPP in spring in ORCHIDEE in northern America,  leaving room for improvements. We also show that uncertainty in the location of hot spots in the prior anthropogenic inventory limits the use of atmospheric COS measurements in inverse modeling.