High Resolution Fossil Fuel Combustion CO₂ Emission Fluxes for the United States

Abstract

Quantification of fossil fuel CO 2 emissions at fine space and time resolution is emerging as a critical need in carbon cycle and climate change research. As atmospheric CO 2 measurements expand with the advent of a dedicated remote sensing platform and denser in situ measurements, the ability to close the carbon budget at spatial scales of ~100 km 2 and daily timescales requires fossil fuel CO 2 inventories at commensurate resolution.Additionally, the growing interest in U.S. climate change policy measures are best served by emissions that are tied to the driving processes in space and time. Here we introduce a high resolution data product (the "Vulcan" inventory:www.purdue.edu/eas/carbon/vulcan/) that has quantified fossil fuel CO 2 emissions for the contiguous U.S. at spatial scales less than 100 km 2 and temporal scales as small as hours. Comparison to the global 1°x1° fossil fuel CO 2 inventory used widely by the carbon cycle and climate change community prior to the construction of the Vulcan inventory, highlights the space/time biases inherent in the population-based approach.3

Surface observations for monitoring urban fossil fuel CO2 emissions: Minimum site location requirements for the Los Angeles megacity

“…Thus, these values entrain uncertainty attributed to different processes including boundary condition and boundary layer height errors. The prior flux uncertainty (C prior ) is based on the Vulcan CO 2 emissions inventory [Gurney et al, 2009]. The average emissions for May is calculated, and uncertainty is defined as 66% of the emissions, with a floor of 3 mmol m -2 s -1 , where grid boxes with uncertainty less than this value are assigned this number.…”

“…Also plotted is the average anthropogenic CO 2 emissions predicted for May 2002 by the Vulcan inventory [Gurney et al, 2009]. Notice the strategy proposed entails placing numerous sites in and around the high emissions concentrated in the LA basin.…”

Targeted emission reductions from global super-polluting power plant units

“…A publicly available, consistent global power plant emission dataset with detailed information can provide a firm basis for such discussions, for example, by highlighting effective ways to mitigate air pollution. Previous studies have compiled global and regional power plant CO 2 emission databases 8,[29][30][31] or regional databases for air pollutant emissions 6,9,10 , and noted the potential for substantial emission reductions from addressing a disproportionately small share of power plants [32][33][34] . Here, we develop a new global database of CO 2 , SO 2 , NO x and primary PM 2.5 emissions from fossil-fuel-and biomass-burning power-generating units as of 2010, which we name the Global Power Emissions Database (GPED); use it to identify the most-polluting units by region, fuel type and pollutant; quantify the disproportionalities of generating capacity and air pollutant emissions; and in each case highlight the best opportunities for reducing those undesirable emissions.…”

Characterizing biospheric carbon balance using CO<sub>2</sub> observations from the OCO-2 satellite

“…A number of existing studies use this model to simulate atmospheric CO 2 mixing ratios (e.g., Law et al, 2008;Gurney et al, 2009;Baker et al, 2010;Schuh et al, 2010;Shiga et al, 2013;ASCENDS Ad Hoc Science Definition Team, 2015 et al, 2015). Several of these studies specifically use PCTM to model CO 2 in the context of satellite missions (e.g., Baker et al, 2010;ASCENDS Ad Hoc Science Definition Team, 2015;Hammerling et al, 2015).…”