The CO2 Human Emissions (CHE) Project: First Steps Towards a European Operational Capacity to Monitor Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions

Abstract

The Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is a binding international treaty signed by 196 nations to limit their greenhouse gas emissions through ever-reducing Nationally Determined Contributions and a system of 5-yearly Global Stocktakes in an Enhanced Transparency Framework. To support this process, the European Commission initiated the design and development of a new Copernicus service element that will use Earth observations mainly to monitor anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The CO2 Human Emissions (CHE) project has been successfully coordinating efforts of its 22 consortium partners, to advance the development of a European CO2 monitoring and verification support (CO2MVS) capacity for anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Several project achievements are presented and discussed here as examples. The CHE project has developed an enhanced capability to produce global, regional and local CO2 simulations, with a focus on the representation of anthropogenic sources. The project has achieved advances towards a CO2 global inversion capability at high resolution to connect atmospheric concentrations to surface emissions. CHE has also demonstrated the use of Earth observations (satellite and ground-based) as well as proxy data for human activity to constrain uncertainties and to enhance the timeliness of CO2 monitoring. High-resolution global simulations (at 9 km) covering the whole of 2015 (labelled CHE nature runs) fed regional and local simulations over Europe (at 5 km and 1 km resolution) and supported the generation of synthetic satellite observations simulating the contribution of a future dedicated Copernicus CO2 Monitoring Mission (CO2M).

Quantification of methane emissions from hotspots and during COVID-19 using a global atmospheric inversion

“…atmospheric concentrations. The system is being developed in the framework of the EU-funded Copernicus CO2 project (coco2-project.eu, 2021) and its precursor, the CO2 Human Emission project (Balsamo et al, 2021) as the global prototype for a new Copernicus anthropogenic CO2 emissions monitoring and verification support capacity (Janssens-Maenhout et al, 2020). For this paper, the focus on CH4 emissions allows to benefit from greater observability from remote-sensing (compared to CO2) and suitably large spatiotemporal variability, addressing three main outstanding questions.…”

Near real-time CO2 fluxes from CarbonTracker Europe for high resolution atmospheric modeling

“…To monitor progress towards the Paris Agreement goals and to verify reported greenhouse gas emissions, the EU is developing a monitoring and verification support (MVS) as part of their Copernicus program (Balsamo et al, 2021). The MVS is expected to heavily use observations of the carbon cycle from in-situ and satellite platforms (Pinty et al, 2017;Janssens-Maenhout et al, 2021;Balsamo et al, 2021).…”

“…To monitor progress towards the Paris Agreement goals and to verify reported greenhouse gas emissions, the EU is developing a monitoring and verification support (MVS) as part of their Copernicus program (Balsamo et al, 2021). The MVS is expected to heavily use observations of the carbon cycle from in-situ and satellite platforms (Pinty et al, 2017;Janssens-Maenhout et al, 2021;Balsamo et al, 2021). Quantitative use of CO 2 (Breón et al, 2015;Boon et al, 2016;Wang et al, 2018) and CH 4 (Thompson et al, 2022;Bergamaschi et al, 2005) mole fraction measurements or retrieval products in data-assimilation (DA) systems can provide a so-called top-down view of the European carbon balance.…”

“…for Switzerland for CH 4 (Bergamaschi et al, 2005), halocarbons (Brunner et al, 2017) and N 2 and CFC (Manning et al, 2011) emissions have provided important feedback to their national emission registration entity (NER) that reports to the UNFCCC. From the MVS perspective, such efforts are best done operationally and in near real-time to quickly inform end-users (Balsamo et al, 2021).…”

“…Many of the signals that MVS aims to verify therefore soon disappear in the noise of biospheric variability and weather patterns often dominate the transport of signals we observe in-situ or from space. It is difficult for MVS systems to resolve such variations and distinguish the flux signals of interest using sparse local observations, while maintaining a carbon balance that agrees with constraints offered by the integration capacity of the atmosphere over large spatiotemporal scales (Balsamo et al, 2021;Peters and Krol, 2020). Here, we make a first step towards integrating scales and constraints, as we plan to merge the existing CarbonTracker Europe large-scale system (CTE) with the high-resolution fluxes produced in near real-time (CTE-HR) we describe in this work.…”