Monitoring urban CO2 emissions from space: current status and future potential
Abhishek
Chatterjee
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
Dustin Roten, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Doyeon Ahn, Morgan State University, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt
Robert Nelson, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Matthäus Kiel, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Thomas Kurosu, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Dien Wu, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
John Lin, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Utah, Salt Lake City
Kevin Gurney, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff
Oral
Cities with their large, dense populations are concentrated sources of CO2 emissions to the atmosphere. Although more than 60% of global fossil fuel CO2 emissions are from cities, yet we lack high-quality city-level emissions inventories and/or independent verification datasets across the majority of global cities. Several cities have also adopted ambitious goals of reaching net-zero emissions by 2030 or 2050. In fact, most recently at COP28, several cities, including those in non-Annex I countries, signed up to be part of the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships for Climate Action (CHAMP ; UNFCCC COP28), thereby obligating themselves to report emissions on a timely basis. So, how can we assist city-scale and local policy and decision-making entities to utilize information from space-based observations to monitor and track GHG emissions? In this presentation, I will show the application of OCO-2 and OCO-3 data across a suite of global cities worldwide. I will show that well-defined and robust mathematical frameworks can exploit the information content in dense, fine-scale, space-based CO2 data to deliver not only whole-city or total emission estimates but also attribute them to individual sectors, such as large point sources, on-road emissions, etc. I will also show examples from recent studies that illustrate the value of exploiting information from co-located emissions of other species to obtain insights into sectoral emission characteristics. Examples from OCO-3, TROPOMI and EMIT data will be shown to demonstrate the value of assimilating information from disparate tracers for reliable source attributions. Even though there are methodological challenges in setting up a multi-species framework, the problem is not insurmountable. Development and refinement of such multi-species frameworks need to start now in order to unlock the true potential of space-based datasets. This is also crucial to optimally utilizing the information from future space-based CO2 emission monitoring sensors, such as Carbon Mapper, ESA’s CO2M, JAXA’s GOSAT-GW and other planned missions. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of implications of space-based datasets for tracking city- and country-level progress towards meeting proposed CO2 emission reduction goals and its value and benefit for advancing bottom-up emission inventories.