Verifying national inventory-based combustion emissions of CO 2 across the UK and mainland Europe using satellite observations of atmospheric CO and CO 2

Scarpelli, Tia; Palmer, Paul; Lunt, Mark; Super, Ingrid; Droste, Arjan

Under the Paris Agreement, countries report their anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in national inventories, used to track progress towards mitigation goals, but they must be independently verified. Atmospheric observations of CO 2, interpreted using inverse methods, can potentially provide that verification. Conventional CO 2 inverse methods infer natural CO 2 fluxes by subtracting a priori estimates of fuel combustion from the a posteriori net CO 2 fluxes, assuming that a priori knowledge for combustion emissions is better than for natural fluxes. We describe an inverse method that uses measurements of CO 2 and carbon monoxide (CO), a trace gas that is co-emitted with CO 2 during combustion, to report self-consistent combustion emissions and natural fluxes of CO 2. We use an ensemble Kalman filter and the GEOS-Chem atmospheric transport model to explore how satellite observations of CO and CO 2 collected by TROPOMI and OCO-2, respectively, can improve understanding of combustion emissions and natural CO 2 fluxes across the UK and mainland Europe, 2018–2021. We assess the value of using satellite observations of CO 2, with and without CO, above what is already available from the in situ network. Using CO 2 satellite observations lead to small corrections to a priori emissions that are inconsistent with in situ observations, due partly to the insensitivity of the atmospheric CO 2 column to CO 2 emission changes. When we introduce satellite CO observations, we find better agreement with our in situ inversion and a better model fit to atmospheric CO 2 observations. Our regional mean a posteriori combustion CO 2 emission ranges 4.6–5.0 Gt a -1 (1.5–2.4 % relative standard deviation), with all inversions reporting an overestimate for Germany’s wintertime emissions. Our national a posteriori CO 2 combustion emissions are highly dependent on the assumed relationship between CO 2 and CO uncertainties, as expected. Generally, we find better results when we use grid-scale based a priori CO 2:CO uncertainty estimates rather than a fixed relationship between the two species.

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Scarpelli, Tia / Palmer, Paul / Lunt, Mark / et al: Verifying national inventory-based combustion emissions of CO2 across the UK and mainland Europe using satellite observations of atmospheric CO and CO2. 2024. Copernicus Publications.

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