A132-02
Global trends in carbon monoxide abundance and emissions

Friday, 11 December 2020: 16:03
Virtual
Helen Marie Worden1, Rebecca R Buchholz1, Sara Martinez-Alonso2, Benjamin Gaubert1, Merritt N Deeter1, Zhe Jiang3, A. Anthony Bloom4, Kazuyuki Miyazaki4, John Worden4 and Bo Zheng5, (1)National Center for Atmospheric Research, Atmospheric Chemistry Observations & Modeling Laboratory, Boulder, CO, United States, (2)NCAR, Boulder, CO, United States, (3)University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China, (4)Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, (5)LSCE Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, Gif-Sur-Yvette Cedex, France
Abstract:
Global concentrations of carbon monoxide (CO) have been decreasing due to improvements in combustion efficiency, air quality regulations and overall reductions in tropical biomass burning. CO plays an important role in both air quality and climate as a precursor for tropospheric ozone and CO2 and as a major sink of OH, the atmospheric “detergent” that affects the lifetime of methane (CH4) and other pollutants. Emissions of CO have an indirect radiative forcing of 0.22 W/m2 (IPCC AR5). Using the 20-year data record from MOPITT (Measurements of Pollution In The Troposphere), we show global and regional trends from satellite observations of atmospheric CO. We also present methods for partitioning CO emissions based on top-down model inversions into CO biomass burning (BB) and fossil fuels (FF) direct sources and from chemical production from emissions of biogenic (BG) VOCs (volatile organic compounds). We find that CO emissions from BB and FF have been decreasing globally, with notable regional exceptions in India, Africa, S. East Asia and recently, Australia. Changes in CO emissions due to the global coronavirus pandemic will also be examined.
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