High Resolution Atmospheric Inversion of the Urban CO2 Emissions during the Winter time using the Baltimore/Washington Urban Greenhouse Gas Observation Network

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) operates the North-East Corridor Baltimore Washington (NEC/BW) project focused on quantifying carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) emissions as well as their uncertainties from the metropolitan areas of Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC, and surrounding suburban communities (BW). In this study we leverage a dense network of CO₂ atmospheric measurements over the BW urban region to develop high resolution (1 km²) CO₂ emissions and their corresponding uncertainties during the winter of 2016-2017 (February, 2017). This study aims at addressing how the BW observing network can help update the existing CO₂ emission inventories and associated uncertainties in space and over hours from this region. We will present preliminary results utilizing February, 2017 CO₂ observations from six operational towers from the BW region. This framework utilizes different parameterizations of the statistical inversion model and combinations of the input data. We use variational backgrounds for each tower, high resolution emission inventories and WRF-STILT transport model-based footprints in the geostatistical inversion framework to measure the impact of these choices on the inversion posterior. We retrieve hourly fluxes constrained by afternoon hour CO₂ observations.