Abstract
The atmospheric background CO2 concentration is a key quantity for the analysis and evaluation of the ongoing climate change. Long-term CO2 observations have been carried out at the high Plateau Rosa mountain station, in the north-western Alps since 1989. The complete time series covers thirty years, and it is suitable for climatological analysis. The continuous CO2 measurements, collected since 1993, were selected, by means of a BaDS (Background Data Selection) filter, to obtain the hourly background data. The monthly background data series was analysed in order to individuate the parameters that characterise the seasonal cycle and the long-term trend. The growth rate was found to be 2.05 ± 0.03 ppm/year, which is in agreement with the global trend. The increased background CO2 concentration at the Plateau Rosa site is the consequence of global anthropic emissions, whereas the natural variability of the climatic system taken from the SOI (South Oscillation Index) and MEI (Multivariate ENSO Index) signals was detected in the inter-annual changes of the Plateau Rosa growth rate.
Highlights
The growth of the atmospheric concentration levels of greenhouse gases in the Industrial Age is considered the major cause of the observed warming of the Earth’s surface [1]
The long-term observations of the CO2 background atmospheric concentration are of fundamental importance to investigating ongoing climate change and represent a useful tool to evaluate the success of mitigation activities against climate change
Measured data are often selected by means of filtering procedures [23], which are essential to estimate the growth rates of greenhouse gas concentrations [24,25,26,27,28], to evaluate the regions characterised by CO2 sinks and sources [29,30,31,32,33,34,35] and to model the long-distance transport of trace gases [36,37]
Summary
The growth of the atmospheric concentration levels of greenhouse gases in the Industrial Age is considered the major cause of the observed warming of the Earth’s surface [1]. Is the primary gas that is contributing to the enhanced greenhouse effect, and the largest contribution to total radiative forcing is caused by the increase in the atmospheric concentration of this atmospheric component [1,2] For this reason, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is considered a key quantity to study and understand the global greenhouse effect and the ongoing climate change, and it is constantly monitored at several locations around the world, and in particular at remote sites [3,4,5,6]. The column concentration fields for 1996–1997 were computed using the same source-receptor model, the backward trajectories and the CO2 concentrations from three monitoring sites at high altitudes in Europe: Plateau Rosa, Zugspitze and Monte Cimone.
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