U003-04
Observed impacts of COVID-19 on urban CO2 emissions

Tuesday, 8 December 2020: 07:35
Alexander J. Turner1,2, Jinsol Kim1, Helen Fitzmaurice3, Catherine Newman1, Kevin A Worthington1, Katherine Chan3, Paul J Wooldridge1, Philipp Koehler4, Christian Frankenberg4,5 and Ronald C Cohen1, (1)University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States, (2)University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States, (3)University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, United States, (4)California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, (5)NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States
Abstract:
Governments restricted mobility and effectively shuttered much of the global economy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Six San Francisco Bay Area counties were the first region in the United States to issue a "shelter-in-place" (SIP) order on March 16, 2020 asking all non-essential workers to stay home. Here we use CO2 observations from 35 Berkeley Environment, Air-quality, and CO2 Network (BEACO2N) nodes and an atmospheric transport model to quantify changes in urban CO2 emissions during the SIP. We infer hourly CO2 fluxes across the region at 900-m spatial resolution for 6 weeks before and 6 weeks during the SIP. We estimate a 28% decrease in anthropogenic CO2 emissions during the SIP and show this decrease is primarily due to changes in traffic (-45%); non-traffic emissions show small changes (-8%). Pronounced changes to the daily and weekly cycle of emissions are observed. We find large reductions to the morning rush hour traffic and decreases to typically congested regions due to traffic bottlenecks such as bridges. These findings provide a glimpse of a future where CO2 emissions from vehicle traffic are reduced through electrification of the vehicle fleet.
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