Toward Using OCO-2 Observations and Lagrangian Modeling to Estimate Urban Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the Middle East
Abstract
Fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are perturbing the Earth's carbon cycle. The majority of these emissions derive from urban regions, which are rapidly changing and expanding with the urbanization of the developing world. Understanding urban emissions is thus crucial for constraining critical uncertainties in the global carbon budget. In this study, we compare top-down observations and bottom-up simulations of total column CO2 (XCO2) of Middle Eastern cities as a means of constraining these cities' emissions. We focus on the city of Riyadh and apply the same methodology to other cities such as Mecca, Jeddah, Jerusalem, and Haifa, both separately and in aggregate. We quantify the relationship between observations of XCO2 from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite and simulations of XCO2 using the column version of the Stochastic Time-Inverted Lagrangian Transport (X-STILT) model coupled with Global Data Assimilation System (GDAS) reanalysis products and three CO2 emissions gridded inventories: the Fossil Fuel Data Assimilation System (FFDAS), the Open-source Data Inventory for Anthropogenic CO2 (ODIAC), and the Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR). We discuss the ability of our observation/model framework to estimate magnitudes of urban emissions and to differentiate between inventory emissions representations. Additionally, we explore the implications of our comparisons on how well the bottom-up inventories used represent Middle Eastern cities, as well as discuss the potential for the use of OCO-2 data to inform emissions estimates of cities around the world.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.A43R3448Y
- Keywords:
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- 0345 Pollution: urban and regional;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTUREDE: 3394 Instruments and techniques;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSESDE: 0428 Carbon cycling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 0478 Pollution: urban;
- regional and global;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES