LA Megacity: An Integrated Land-Atmosphere System for Urban CO2 Emissions

About 10% of the global population lives in the word's 20 megacities (cities with urban populations greater than 10 million people). Megacities account for approximately 20% of the global anthropogenic fossil fuel CO2 (FFCO2) emissions, and their proportion of emissions increases monotonically with the world population and urbanization. Megacities range in spatial extent from ~1000 - 10,000 km2 with complex topography and variable landscapes. We present here the first attempt at building an integrated land-atmosphere modeling system for megacity environments, developed and evaluated for urban CO2 emissions over the Los Angeles (LA) Megacity area. The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) - Chem model was coupled to a ~1.3-km FFCO2 emission product, "Hestia-LA", to simulate the transport of CO2 across the LA magacity. We define the optimal model resolution to represent both the spatial variability of the atmospheric dynamics and the spatial patterns from the CO2 emission distribution. In parallel, we evaluate multiple configurations of WRF with various physical schemes, using meteorological observations from the CalNex-LA campaign of May-June 2010. Our results suggest that there is no remarkable difference between the medium- (4-km) and high- (1.3-km) resolution simulations in terms of atmospheric model performance. However, the high-resolution modeled CO2 mixing ratios clearly outperform the results at medium resolution for capturing both the spatial distribution and the temporal variability of the urban CO2 signals. We compare the impact of physical representation errors and emission aggregation errors on the modeled CO2 mixing ratios across the LA megacity. Finally, we present a novel approach to evaluate the design of the current surface network over the LA megacity using the modeled spatial correlations. These results reinforce the importance of using high-resolution emission products over megacities to represent correctly the large spatial gradients in atmospheric CO2 mixing ratios.