National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Monitoring CO2 Anthropogenic Emissions with an Earth system approach

About the Talk Under the guidance of the European Commission, and in particular its CO2 Task Force, developments of a new Copernicus service elements capable to use Earth observations to monitor human-induced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have reached a first prototype phase. The CO2 Human Emissions (CHE) project had successfully gathered efforts of 22 partners to develop the building blocks (mapping, modelling, data assimilation, uncertainty characterization) of a European CO2 monitoring and verification support (CO2MVS) capacity for global CO2 emissions related to human activities. A chain of modelling approaches produces global, regional and local CO2 simulations, with a focus on the representation of human-emission sources. The CHE project has moved closer towards a high-resolution CO2 global inversion capacity to connect atmospheric concentrations to surface emissions, and shown how satellites and ground- based Earth observations can be used to limit uncertainties and to prepare for an operational CO2 monitoring system. High-resolution global simulations (at 9 km) covering the whole of 2015 were used as input for regional and local simulations over Europe (at 5 km and 1 km resolution) and have been used to simulate satellite observations from a future dedicated CO2 Monitoring mission. The CHE Horizon 2020 project, which ran from October 2017 to December 2020, transferred all its findings to a new project, now dedicated to the prototype Copernicus CO2 Service, the CoCO2 project running from January 2021 to December 2023. This follow-on project is focused on supporting the 1st Global Stocktake in 2023 of the Paris Agreement in partnership with the European Commission, countries of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and international interested parties. The presentation will include some of the key achievements, list the challenges and perspectives in 2021.

About the Speakers Gianpaolo Balsamo is an ECMWF principal scientist and team leader for Earth system coupled processes. He is involved in the coordination and system integration for the CHE/CoCO2 projects. He has a PhD/Habilitation in Meteorology/Earth system science from the French University Paul Sabatier and an invited professorship for climate-change at Politecnico of Turin, department of environmental, land and infrastructure engineering. Philippe Ciais is a researcher of the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climatet de l'Environnement (LSCE), the climate change research unit of the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL). He is a physicist working on the global carbon cycle of planet Earth, climate change, ecology and geosciences. Philippe Ciais studied Physics at École normale supérieure and received a PhD in 1991 entitled “Holocene climate record of Antarctic ice cores”.

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