Ten years of CO emissions as seen from Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT)

The Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT) retrievals are used as top-down constraints in an inversion for global CO emissions, for the past 10 years (from March 2000 to December 2009), at 8 day and 3.75° × 2.75° (longitude, latitude) resolution. The method updates a standard prior inventory and yields large increments in terms of annual regional budgets and seasonality. Our validation strategy consists in comparing our posterior-modeled concentrations with several sets of independent measurements: surface measurements, aircraft, and satellite. The posterior emissions, with a global 10 year average of 1430 TgCO/yr, are 37% higher than the prior ones, built from the EDGAR 3.2 and the GFEDv2 inventories (1038 TgCO/yr on average). In addition, they present some significant seasonal variations in the Northern Hemisphere that are not present in our prior nor in others' major inventories. Our results also exhibit some large interannual variability due to biomass burning emissions, climate, and socioeconomic factors; CO emissions range from 1504 TgCO (in 2007) to 1318 TgCO (in 2009).