It was realized early that, high precision long-term carbon cycle observations form the essential basis of carbon cycle understanding and that these observations must be secured beyond the lifetime of a research project. ICOS aims to build a network of standardized, long-term, high precision integrated monitoring of:
- atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations of CO2, CH4, CO and radiocarbon-CO2 to quantify the fossil fuel component
- ecosystem fluxes of CO2, H2O, and heat together with ecosystem variables.
The ICOS infrastructure will integrate terrestrial and atmospheric observations at various sites into a single, coherent, highly precise dataset. These data will allow a unique regional top-down assessment of fluxes from atmospheric data, and a bottom-up assessment from ecosystem measurements and fossil fuel inventories. Target is a daily mapping of sources and sinks at scales down to about 10 km, as a basis for understanding the exchange processes between the atmosphere, the terrestrial surface and the ocean.
The ICOS infrastructure is approved as a research facility by ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures).
The ICOS infrastructure has the following components:
An EU financed pre-project is currently developing the ICOS Infrastructure with the following time-line:
A Danish pre-project for implementing ICOS in Denmark was carried out during 2009-2010. The project resulted in a number of reports:
Ibrom, A. and Pilegaard, K, 2010: White paper on research opportunities for Danish research arising from the Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS) infrastructure, Risø DTU, March 2010, 28pp. ICOS_DK_White Paper_2010
Bager, S. L., Knudsen, M., Antoft, J. A. and Søgaard, H., 2010: Kortlægning af Danmarks drivhusgasbudget baseret på ICOS relevant måleteknik, remote sensing og national statistik. Københavns Universitet, 2010, 28pp.
Bøgh, E., 2009: Kortlægning af potentielle lokaliteter for etablering af ICOS Flux station i Dansk løvskov. RUC 2009, 31pp.
Dellwik, E. and Sogachev, A., 2010: Flow and footprint simulations for a flux site in fetch-limited forested terrain. Risø DTU, March 2010, 11pp.
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