Multiple quality tests for analysing CO2 fluxes in a beech temperate forest

Eddy covariance (EC) measurements are widely used to estimate the amount of carbon sequestrated by terrestrial biomes. The decision to exclude an EC flux from a database (bad quality records, turbulence regime not adequate, footprint problem,...) becomes an important step in the CO2 flux determination procedure. In this paper an innovative combination of existing assessment tests is used to give a relatively complete evaluation of the net ecosystem exchange measurements. For the 2005 full-leaf season at the Hesse site, the percentage of rejected half-hours is relatively high (59.7%) especially during night-time (68.9%). This result strengthens the importance of the data gap filling method. The data rejection does not lead to a real improvement of the accuracy of the relationship between the CO2 fluxes and the climatic factors especially during the nights. The spatial heterogeneity of the soil respiration (on a site with relatively homogenous vegetation pattern) seems large enough to mask an increase of the goodness of the fit of the ecosystem respiration measurements with a dependence on soil temperature and water content when the tests are used to reject EC data. However, the data rejected present some common characteristics. Their removal lead to an increase in the total amount of CO2 respired (24%) and photosynthesised (16%) during the 2005 full-leaf season. Consequently the application of our combination of multiple quality tests is able improve the inter-annual analysis. The systematic application on the large database like the CarboEurope and FLUXNET appears to be necessary.