Ra. Plumb et Xy. Zheng, SOURCE DETERMINATION FROM TRACE GAS OBSERVATIONS - AN ORTHOGONAL FUNCTION-APPROACH AND RESULTS FOR LONG-LIVED GASES WITH SURFACE SOURCES, JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH-ATMOSPHERES, 101(D13), 1996, pp. 18569-18585
Differences between measured concentrations of atmospheric trace gases
at different locations across the globe contain information about the
locations of the sources of these gases. We use an orthogonal functio
n approach and experiments with a three-dimensional transport model to
determine what source distributions can, in principle, be identified
from such information. The ability to detect and to locate localized s
ources is severely limited by the number of observational sites and by
the error growth implicit in the inverse problem. The former limitati
on appears to be the most severe restriction in practice, in contrast
to results obtained using two-dimensional (zonally averaged) models. D
ifferences between results from two- and three-dimensional models are
especially severe for tropical sources.