Net Daytime Carbon Dioxide Fluxes Over Eastern Canadian Forests: An Application of MODIS Imagery

Over the past few decades, unprecedented rises in atmospheric CO₂ and the connection to global climate change has drawn a great deal of attention from scientists, policy makers, and the general public, worldwide. In this paper we present a methodology to estimate net daytime CO₂ fluxes over eastern Canadian forests. The methodology is based on deriving explicit linkages between relationships in flux data from one of four flux- towers in southwest New Brunswick, Canada (representative of the Atlantic Maritime Ecozone) and MODIS images. Our work reveals that a strong relationship exists between growing-season averaged net daytime CO₂ fluxes and absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (APAR; i.e., r²=97.1%). This relationship is used in conjunction with MODIS-derived APAR fluxes to obtain spatial calculations of net CO₂ fluxes.