Monitoring anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions from space

The increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration due to human activity has significantly altered the Earth´s climate.

To mitigate the negative effects of climate change, the majority of the world´s nations have pledged to reduce CO2 emissions under the Paris Agreement, which will require continuous follow-up of worldwide fossil fuel emissions.

A promising, objective, and unified approach to monitoring emissions is to track changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations using satellites, which can then be traced back to the emissions using atmospheric transport models and inverse methods.

Several space agencies have launched or plan to launch satellites dedicated to the monitoring of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

However, most contemporary inverse methods have been designed primarily for the comparably sparse in situ network (a few hundred sites worldwide), and there is a knowledge gap on how to make the best use of the massive amount of CO2 measurements from satellites (for example, NASA´s OCO-2 delivers roughly 100,000 measurements worldwide each day).I propose to further develop a regional CO2 inversion system to effectively assimilate satellite CO2 observations by using state-of-the-art data assimilation methods.

The modeling system is already capable of ingesting high volumes of observations from weather satellites such as GOES-16 and will be adapted for CO2-observing satellites in this project.

The specific research questions that will be addressed are: (1) How to assimilate high-resolution CO2 satellite images to jointly estimate anthropogenic and natural CO2 emissions and uptake? (2) How to account for large model errors and spatiotemporal error correlations when assimilating CO2 satellite measurements? (3) What accuracy can we expect from top-down emission estimates based on current and near-future satellite observations?

Successful completion of this project will significantly enhance the capability and realize the potential of space-based CO2 measurements for monitoring CO2 emissions, which will further our understanding of CO2 emissions and uptake and support efforts to mitigate climate change.