Overview of the North-East Corridor: Baltimore/Washington Urban Greenhouse Gas Observation Network
Abstract
In 2015, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched a new greenhouse gas measurement project focused on quantifying carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emissions from the metropolitan areas of Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC, and surrounding suburban communities. This urban testbed (the Northeast Corridor/Baltimore-Washington -NEC/BW) project joins two previously established NIST-sponsored urban testbeds located in Indianapolis (the Indianapolis Flux Experiment, INFLUX) and Los Angeles (the LA Megacity Carbon Project). These urban testbeds use dense observations from multiple platforms to develop methods for trace gas flux estimation in urban regions.
A network of in-situ measurements, housed on communications towers, has been deployed in the last two years, with 11 sites operational by mid-2018. Currently these continuously measure CO2 and CH4 concentrations in air sampled from multiple inlets on each tower. Five additional sites are planned for late 2018-2019 installation. The completed CO2 and CH4 observing network consists of 12 towers inside the central Baltimore and Washington, D.C. urban core, and four located outside the immediate metropolitan area. Several modeling efforts are underway to use tower network observations to constrain anthropogenic and biogenic CO2 and CH4 fluxes in the urban area and in the greater Eastern US region. These analyses couple emissions flux models with multiple transport and dispersion models and statistical inversion methods. Here we will give an overview of the continuous CO2 and CH4 observations from our tower-based network. We will present the procedures for data quality assurance and calibration to WMO standards and uncertainty analysis. We will also present analysis of observations from 2016 and 2017, including analysis of gradients between rural, suburban, and urban sites and the determination of background concentrations and urban enhancements.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.A43R3472K
- 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