Tropical lands play an important role in the global carbon cycle yet their contribution remains uncertain owing to sparse observations. Satellite observations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) have greatly increased spatial coverage over tropical regions, providing the potential for improved estimates of terrestrial fluxes. Despite this advancement, the spread among satellite-based and in-situ atmospheric CO2 flux inversions over northern tropical Africa (NTA), spanning 0-24◦N, remains large. Satellite-based estimates of an annual source of 0.8-1.45 PgC yr−1 challenge our understanding of tropical and global carbon cycling. Here, we compare posterior mole fractions from the suite of inversions participating in the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) Version 10 Model Intercomparison Project (v10 MIP) with independent in-situ airborne observations made over the tropical Atlantic Ocean by the NASA Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission during four seasons. We develop emergent constraints on tropical African CO2 fluxes using flux-concentration relationships defined by the model suite. We find an annual flux of 0.14 ± 0.39 PgC yr−1 (mean and standard deviation) for NTA, 2016-2018. The satellite-based flux bias suggests a potential positive concentration bias in OCO-2 B10 and earlier version retrievals over land in NTA during the dry season. Nevertheless, the OCO-2 observations provide improved flux estimates relative to the in situ observing network at other times of year, indicating stronger uptake in NTA during the wet season than the in-situ inversion estimates.

Understanding terrestrial ecosystems and their response to anthropogenic climate change requires quantification of land-atmosphere carbon exchange. However, top-down and bottom-up estimates of large-scale land-atmosphere fluxes, including the northern extratropical growing season net flux (GSNF), show significant discrepancies. We develop a data-driven metric for the GSNF using atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration observations collected during the High-Performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research (HIAPER) Pole-to-Pole Observations (HIPPO) and Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom) flight campaigns. This aircraft-derived metric is bias corrected using three independent atmospheric inversion systems. We estimate the northern extratropical GSNF to be 5.7 ± 0.2 Pg C and use it to evaluate net biosphere productivity from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 and 6 (CMIP5 and CMIP6) models. While the model-to-model spread in the GSNF has decreased in CMIP6 models relative to that of the CMIP5 models, there is still disagreement on the magnitude and timing of seasonal carbon uptake with most models underestimating the GSNF and overestimating the length of the growing season relative to the observations. We also use an emergent constraint approach to estimate annual northern extratropical gross primary productivity to be 56 ± 15 Pg C, heterotrophic respiration to be 25 ± 11 Pg C, and net primary productivity to be 28 ± 10 Pg C. The flux inferred from these aircraft observations provides an additional constraint on large-scale, gross fluxes in prognostic Earth system models that may ultimately improve our ability to accurately predict carbon-climate feedbacks.