High resolution fossil\industrial CO2: Historical Context

Kevin GurneyPurdue University

Department of Earth and Atmospheric SciencePurdue Climate Change Research Center

A52B: Frost & Petron presiding

……..In place of talk by Blasing and colleagues

Posters and talks

9 excellent posters yesterday (A41C-0042 to 0049)

6 talks this morning

Global

Regional: Asia, Europe

Urban: Salt Lake

Methodological: Radon/14C, air quality, energy sales/consumption

This session and the work in recent years heralds a renewed interest in the topic and a broadening

of motivations and methods

History: evolution of estimatesMotivation:

Explain observed CO2 rise

Support climate change projections

Work in the 1980s: Keeling: (1978)

Rotty: global national inventory

Marland:

Global 0-D UN production for years 1950-1982

UN “consumption” @ 5º x 5º for average year

Evolution of estimates continued

5º x 5º with population and industrial concentration

Marland and Rotty, 1984 using consumption

Adding more space & time

Rotty: seasonal global and regional (captured ~87% of globe) Found ptp of 24% of the annual mean.

Andres et al., 1996: moved to 1º x 1º with decadel res time series

EDGAR in the late 1990s - more sectoral/fuel detail

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (LZW) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Other disciplines

Atm chemistry campaigns: Trace-P

Modeling efforts

NOx, CO, VOCs

IPCC: integrated assessment - combining socioeconomics and energy systems analysis (we’ll come back to this)

We thought we were done!

By the 00’s, the carbon cycle community considered the fossil CO2 problem “solved” at least to the extent that was needed.

Focus on “missing sink”, terrestrial net uptake

What have we been using?

1 degree resolution

Sales, consumption at national level with pop for proxy spatial

Why is this no longer adequate?

1. Inversion moving to smaller scales driven, in part, by planned satellite CO2 measurements (OCO)

2. There is likely bias lurking (pop not best proxy)

• California electricity

• Interstates

• Diurnal, seasonal cycles

3. “local” climate policy has emerged in many places: significant need for spatiotemporal information

4. inadequate for dynamic, process understanding

1. Inversions moving to smaller scales driven, in part, by planned satellite CO2 measurements (OCO)

NACP Science Implementation Strategy (Denning, editor), 2005

Fossil emissions are the dominant net source of CO2 in North America….

State- or county-level inventories of fossil fuel emissions must be downscaled using emission models driven by statistics of power and industrial plant usage, locations, pop , weather, vehicular traffic, and other data…..

The goal is to provide daily or subdiurnal gridded emissions estimates commensurate with the <10 km flux analyses

Why is this no longer adequate?

1. Inversions moving to smaller scales driven, in part, by planned satellite CO2 measurements (OCO)

2. There is likely bias lurking (pop not best proxy)

• California electricity

• Interstates

• Diurnal, seasonal cycles

3. “local” climate policy has emerged in many places: significant need for spatiotemporal information

4. inadequate for dynamic, process understanding

2. There is likely bias lurking (pop not best proxy)

• California electricity

• Interstates

• Diurnal, seasonal cycles

Why is this no longer adequate?

1. Inversion moving to smaller scales driven, in part, by planned satellite CO2 measurements (OCO)

2. There is likely bias lurking (pop not best proxy)

• California electricity

• Interstates

• Diurnal, seasonal cycles

3. “local” climate policy has emerged in many places: significant need for spatiotemporal information

4. inadequate for dynamic, process understanding

3. “local” climate policy has emerged in many places: significant need for spatiotemporal information

New approaches?

Our Options: Downscale further?

Better proxies?

Scale with other pollutants?

Energy modeling?

what sources burn when, where and why?????

trains, planes & automobilesPowerplants, factories

Home heat, gas stations

The latest wave

There is now a growing community of researchers tackling various aspects of

high resolution CO2 emissions

• Petron, Frost and colleagues: CEM and mobile emissions

• Gurney, Fischer and colleagues: 10s km and hourly

• Andres, Gregg: state level and monthly

• Hirsch: 14C/Radon

• Pataki: urban

• Blasing, Broniak & Marland: state level/monthly

• Ackerman & Sundquist: point comparisons

1st HRFF meeting

Meeting at Purdue: Spring ‘07

Prioritize

Strategize

Plan proposals, collaborative work

This work can contribute to more than C science

Hestia

Build a global high resolution fossil/industrial CO2 model-data fusion system that is fully process-driven:

Google Earth Emissions

Thank you