Greenhouse gas observations from the Northeast Corridor tower network

Abstract

We present the organization, structure, instrumentation, and measurements of the Northeast Corridor greenhouse gas observation network. This network of tower-based in-situ carbon dioxide and methane observations was established in 2015 with the goal of quantifying emissions of these gases in urban areas in the north-eastern United States. A specific focus of the network is the cities of Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., USA, with a high density of observation stations 15 in these two urban areas. Additional observation stations are scattered throughout the US northeast, established to complement other existing urban and regional networks and to investigate emissions throughout this complex region with a high population density and multiple metropolitan areas. Data described in this paper are archived at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and can be found at https://doi.org/10.18434/M32126 . Ren et al., 2018;Lamb et al., 2016;Yadav et al., 2019). Several urban top-down measurement efforts are underway in various

Background conditions for an urban greenhouse gas network in the Washington, DC, and Baltimore metropolitan region

“…Locations were determined by network design studies (Lopez-Coto et al, 2017;Mueller et al, 2018). Details on the atmospheric CO 2 and CH 4 mole fraction measurements from this network are found in Karion et al (2020). In this study we use observations from the six urban sites in Fig.…”

“…CO 2 was chosen rather than CH 4 because we believe we have a relatively realistic flux field to use for CO 2 , whereas for CH 4 , we find large differences between model estimates and observations. In particular, BUC is in an area with a large influence of local wetlands (Karion et al, 2020), so that the synthetic experiment would not yield necessarily realistic results without an accurate wetland model. The same-day afternoon sampling of CO 2 is also more likely to be a problem due to strong biospheric fluxes in summer influencing observed concentrations at the background station; whether the column method alleviates this issue was a key question to answer with the synthetic experiment.…”

“…The goal of this study is to construct and evaluate a background for the Northeast Corridor Washington DC/Baltimore tower-based urban network described in Karion et al (2020). We investigate many of the methods mentioned above, with some exceptions: we do not investigate the baseline/remote station, low-percentile, or optimized background methods.…”

Greenhouse gas observations from the Northeast Corridor tower network

“…This data set of hourly averaged observations from the Northeast Corridor tower-based network is available on the NIST data portal at https://data.nist.gov (last access: 23 March 2020) under the https://doi.org/10.18434/M32126 ( Karion et al, 2019 ). Initially, the repository will contain data from 23 sites ( Table 1 ) for years spanning 2015–2018; not all years are available for all sites.…”

“…Additional observation stations are scattered throughout the northeastern US, established to complement other existing urban and regional networks and to investigate emissions throughout this complex region with a high population density and multiple metropolitan areas. Data described in this paper are archived at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and can be found at https://doi.org/10.18434/M32126 ( Karion et al, 2019 ).…”