ADAPT seminar

Speaker: Dr. Tomohiro Oda from Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)
Topic: "Quantifying fossil fuel CO2 emissions in global, regional and local carbon budget problems"
Room: 529 Walker Building (refreshments served)
Time: Tuesday Aug 9, 2016 02:00pm to 03:00pm
Abstract: A better understanding of carbon dioxide (CO2) sources and sinks and the underlying processes should help improving our ability to predict future climate. CO2 emissions from Fossil Fuel combustion (FFCO2) are the largest input to the global carbon cycle over decadal time scales and main cause of the increased atmospheric CO2. FFCO2 is often estimated with a good accuracy at global and country scales (8% for global) and serves as a reference in carbon budget analysis to infer terrestrial biosphere flux and oceanic exchange (e.g. atmospheric growth = FFCO2 - natural uptake). Thus, the errors in FFCO2 will be aliasing to the final flux estimates. Prescribing FFCO2 has become more important as forward/inverse models are running at a higher resolution to utilize CO2 data collected from multiple platforms.

We built a high-resolution global FFCO2 emission model ODIAC. ODIAC is based on disaggregation of country emissions using satellite-observed nighttime lights and power plant profiles. The use of nightlight data should allow us to observe dynamic emission changes in timely manner and incorporate them into the model. New nightlight data collected by Suomi-NPP/VIIRS will further improve the emission mapping capability. ODIAC is now being widely used by the carbon flux inversion community. Quantification of FFCO2 is also very important in terms of emission management. The international compliance of emission reduction for example has been monitored by emission inventories by countries. The framework is well established, however emission inventories are often prone to systematic biases and current framework is not fully capable of detecting the bias. We thus need an independent tool to directly measure our reduction effort. In my talk, I will also present how satellite data can be used for the carbon management problem.