NO2 emissions from Western U.S. power plants observed from space

The high spatial resolution and daily coverage of OMI instrument on NASA's EOS Aura platform enables the monitoring of NO2 emissions from individual power plants. Power plants in the western United States provide ideal test cases for comparing emission inventory development methods. These plants are generally isolated from large metropolitan areas, providing relatively distinct signals which can be used to compare bottom-up emission inventory methods with top-down satellite inventory methods. Model NO2 columns simulations using the Weather Research and Forecasting-Chemistry model (WRF-Chem) for the western US domain during the summer of 2005 will be compared with OMI satellite observations.