Can a COVID-19 related regional-scale CO2 emission reduction be detected from space using satellite XCO2 retrievals?: A case study for East China

Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in reduced carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in 2020 in large parts of the world. We have analysed an ensemble of satellite retrievals of column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of CO₂, i.e. XCO₂, to find out if the COVID-19 related regional-scale reduction of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions can be detected from space. We focus on East China and analysed a set of latest version XCO₂ data products from the satellites Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) and Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT). We use a data-driven approach, which is based on the computation of XCO₂ anomalies using a method called DAM. Via DAM, trends and seasonal variations are largely filtered out and resulting positive values of the XCO₂ anomalies correlate with the location of major CO₂ source regions such as East China after spatio-temporal averaging. We analysed satellite data between January 2015 to May 2020 and compared monthly XCO₂ anomalies in the time period January to May 2020 with corresponding monthly XCO₂ anomalies from previous years. In order to link the satellite-derived XCO₂ anomalies to East China fossil fuel (FF) emissions, we used target region XCO₂ and corresponding FF emissions from a model.