Tracking Human CO₂ Emissions from Medium-Sized Cities

Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.

Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres

We cannot manage what we cannot measure. To combat climate change, monitoring CO₂ emissions across scales is crucial to understand the carbon cycle and to design effective emission mitigation policies. At the urban scale, measuring CO₂ emissions is particularly challenging due to potentially large uncertainties in existing methods and the difficulties to track dynamics in time.

Mallia et al. [2023] developed a Bayesian atmospheric inverse model, which was constrained by stationary network and mobile CO₂ observations, to estimate anthropogenic CO₂ emission reductions from Salt Lake City during the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. The results illustrate the system’s capability to track human emissions with spatial-temporal dynamics in a medium-sized city, showing the possibility and necessity to expand the urban CO₂ monitoring network for emission accounting. This will play a fundamental role in climate change mitigation at the urban scale.

Citation: Mallia, D. V., Mitchell, L. E., Gonzalez Vidal, A. E., Wu, D., Kunik, L., & Lin, J. C. (2023). Can we detect urban-scale CO2 emission changes within medium-sized cities? Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 128, e2023JD038686. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JD038686

—Bo Zheng, Associate Editor, JGR: Atmospheres

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