Two biogenic volatile organic compound emission datasets over Europe based on land surface modelling and satellite data assimilation

Journal article, 2026

Biogenic volatile organic compound (BVOC) emissions from vegetation represent a major source of volatile compounds globally and play an important role as precursors for tropospheric ozone. Understanding their emissions is therefore crucial for quantifying the impact of ozone on air quality. We present two datasets of biogenic volatile organic compound emissions that cover the European modelling domain of the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service at a resolution of 0.1° × 0.1° to support the study of European scale air quality. The compounds included in the dataset follow the VOCs included in the regional atmospheric chemistry model mechanism (RACM). The datasets were produced within the framework of the EU's SEEDS project. We produced each dataset by coupling modelling output variables from the SURFEX land surface model with the MEGAN3.0 BVOC emission model. In one instance, the SURFEX model was run in free-running mode, which we term the open-loop (OL) and in the other case we assimilated satellite observations of leaf area index (LAI), which we term the analysis. The OL and analysis land surface model outputs form the basis for each emission dataset that are called SURFEX-MEGAN3.0 OL (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LAUVTU, Hamer et al., 2025a) and SURFEX-MEGAN3.0 analysis (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/69G1FX, Hamer et al., 2025b), respectively. The OL dataset is available over a five-year period from 2018–2022 and the analysis dataset is available over the three-year period 2018–2020. SURFEX was run for both the OL and analysis simulations in a configuration that allowed simulated vegetation to respond to variations in meteorology over time to more realistically track vegetation phenology. Evaluation of the land surface model output LAI and root-zone soil moisture (RZSM) showed that the OL and analysis simulations had good skill at tracking temporal changes in both variables, with the analysis performing better in each instance. We perform a variety of evaluations on the isoprene emissions specifically given the importance of this compound for atmospheric chemistry. We evaluated the temporal variability of isoprene emissions in both datasets and found that the majority of the interannual and monthly variability was linked to variability in LAI that in specific cases, like the summer of 2019, could be linked to drought impacts on vegetation growth simulated by SURFEX. We evaluated the daily temporal variability of the OL and analysis isoprene emission datasets against in-situ online observations of isoprene concentrations at 8 sites in western Europe and found moderate to strong correlation between the emissions and observations in almost all location-year pairings. We also evaluated the OL and analysis emission datasets against other published bottom-up isoprene emission datasets over the same European domain used in this study. We found that the SURFEX-MEGAN3.0 OL and analysis isoprene emission datasets lie between the minimum (CAMS-GLOB-BIOv3.1) and maximum (MEGAN-MACC) published emission datasets based on bottom-up approaches. Furthermore, we were able to attribute differences in seasonality between SURFEX-MEGAN3.0 and other emission inventories to differences in the temporal variability of the underlying LAI dataset used to compile them. Overall, our findings show the importance of variability in LAI in controlling isoprene emissions on monthly to annual timescales. Combining this with the demonstrated skill of the emissions in evaluation with independent data, this points towards the value of an Earth-system approach to BVOC emission modelling.