A221-0009
Data sampling from the space and urban fossil-fuel CO2 emissions: do we measure often enough?
Wednesday, 16 December 2020
Poster
Ruixue Lei1, Sha Feng2, Dien Wu3, Chris O'Dell4, John C Lin3, Matthäus Kiel5, Annmarie Eldering6, Gregoire Broquet7, Alexandre Danjou7, Tomohiro Oda8 and Thomas Lauvaux7,9, (1)Pennsylvania State University Main Campus, Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science, University Park, PA, United States, (2)The Pennsylvania State University, Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science, University Park, PA, United States, (3)University of Utah, Atmospheric Sciences, Salt Lake City, UT, United States, (4)Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, Fort Collins, CO, United States, (5)California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, (6)NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, (7)LSCE Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, Gif-Sur-Yvette Cedex, France, (8)Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, MD, United States, (9)Pennsylvania State University Main Campus, Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science, University Park, United States
Abstract:
Fossil fuel combustion caused atmospheric CO2 to reach 150% of its pre-industrial level. Proper management of fossil fuel sources designed to achieve
the 2.0-degree temperature threshold will require accurate and rapid monitoring of emissions from major metropolitan areas to track progress in emission reduction
. Despite the recent increase in satellite observations of atmospheric
CO2 (e.g. Orbiting Carbon Observatory OCO-2, GOSAT-2), FFCO
2 emissions over urban areas remain difficult to quantify accurately from space due to cloud coverage, aerosol contamination, coincidence with biospheric signals, and a limited density of soundings near urban centers.
To examine the limit and potential of space missions on detecting FFCO2 emissions from urban areas, we first studied the loss of OCO-2 retrievals, defined at the global scale but not studied over urbanized areas. The results show that 80-90% of XCO2 soundings from OCO-2 are filtered out by quality flags mainly due to cloud and aerosol. The comparison between XCO2 from OCO-2 and several models (incl. WRF-Chem, IME, and X-STILT) over Lahore, the second largest city in Pakistan, demonstrates that the quality flags are valid at the local scale, and should be considered when quantifying urban emissions. As a consequence, the remaining soundings are not sufficient to capture the fast-increasing trend of FFCO2 emission from Lahore. Second, we examined the next generation of CO2 monitoring satellites, here the OCO-3 mission, with more intensive Snapshot Area Mapping (SAM) observations to provide a new opportunity to study CO2 emissions from complex urban areas, focusing on Los Angeles as a first example. We finally discuss the impact of data losses to monitor urban emissions and discuss the potential of upcoming satellite missions to achieve the projected annual rates of the Paris Agreement emission trajectories.
