On the Impact of High Resolution Fossil Fuel Emission Inventories for Carbon Cycle Studies

Can global atmospheric transport models be used to evaluate high resolution emission inventories from anthropogenic activities? Fossil fuel carbon emissions (FFCE) are fairly well-known on the annual and national scale. For most global modeling studies of the carbon cycle, these emissions are kept constant through the year and are scaled according to population density. Several research groups are working on developing inventories that more accurately represent the spatial and temporal distribution of the emissions. We have built an hourly emission inventory for electricity generation and transportation for the continental USA at 1x1 degree resolution. This inventory and other lower-resolution inventories are used in the global atmospheric transport model TM5 to create simulated CO2 fields that can be compared. We also compare modeled CO2 fields that result from both biospheric and anthropogenic fluxes with in-situ surface measurements and vertical profiles from the NOAA/GMD network.