A new Remote Sensing Network for London Carbon Emissions
Hartmut Boesch, University of Leicester, hb100@le.ac.uk (Presenter)
Neil Humpage, University of Leicester, nh58@le.ac.uk
Robbie Ramsey, University of Edinburgh, robbie.ramsay@ed.ac.uk
Andrew Gray, University of Edinburgh, andrew.gray@ed.ac.uk
Jack Gillespie, University of Edinburgh, jack.gillespie@ed.ac.uk
Paul Palmer, University of Edinburgh, pip@ed.ac.uk
Jerome Woodwark, University of Edinburgh, jerome.woodwark@gmail.com
Mat Williams, University of Edinburgh, mat.williams@ed.ac.uk
The vast majority of anthropogenic CO2 emissions stems from cities and urban areas whose role is expected to further grow in the future with due to future population growth and urbanisation. Cities are also the focal point of many political decisions on mitigating and stabilization of emissions with often more ambitious targets than national governments. Thus, if we want to devise robust, well-informed climate change mitigation policies, we need to have a much better understanding of the carbon budget for cities, the involved carbon emissions and their trends. However, quantifying carbon emissions from cities is a major challenge due to the heterogeneity of anthropogenic emissions in an urban context and the interlacing of ecosystems uptake during the growing season, which need to be carefully separated, and the lack of appropriate observing systems of atmospheric CO2 for cities.
New satellite missions such as NASA’s OCO-3 and the future MicroCarb and CO2M mission are targeting urban emissions that can allow to overcome current limitations. There is now an urgent need for developing methods and networks for evaluating the quality of satellite data over cities where aerosol loadings can be high in addition to appropriate approaches that can link such satellite CO2 observations to anthropogenic carbon emission from a city.
In this presentation, we will present first results from a new activity that aims at bringing together satellite CO2 data with ground-based remote sensing data and high-resolution transport modelling focused on London. We have setup three sites along the prevailing wind direction, each equipped with a portable EM27/SUN spectrometer (for CO2, CH4 and CO), a multi-axis UV/vis DOAS instrument (for NO2, HCHO, aerosol) and an aeronet photometer (for aerosols). The ground-based observation are used to assess trace gas measurements from OCO-2/-3, GOSAT/-2 and TROPOMI with a focus on gradients across the city and multi-species correlations between CH4, CO2, CO and NO2. Finally, we will use high-resolution modelling with the UK Met Office Lagrangian Dispersion model NAME to link to satellite and ground-based remote sensing observations to emission inventories for London.
Poster: Poster_Boesch__80_25.pdf
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: 4.2a Observations to quantify hot spots and local/urban emissions
Session Date: Thursday (6/17) 10:00 AM