Estimating bacteria emissions from inversion of atmospheric transport: Sensitivity to modelled particle characteristics

Abstract

Model-simulated transport of atmospheric trace components can be combined with observed concentrations to obtain estimates of ground-based sources using various inversion techniques. These approaches have been applied in the past primarily to obtain source estimates for long-lived trace gases such as CO2. We consider the application of similar techniques to source estimation for atmospheric aerosols, using as a case study the estimation of bacteria emissions from different ecosystem regions in the global atmospheric chemistry and climate model ECHAM5/MESSy-Atmospheric Chemistry (EMAC). Source estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo is applied to a suite of sensitivity simulations, and the g..