Using OCO-2 Data to Analyze Anthropogenic CO2 Hotspots: First Preliminary Results

Hello,

just submitted the abstract below to the "12th International Workshop on Greenhouse Gas Measurements from Space." I am not going, but our boss Johanna Tamminen will present this.

Janne

Using OCO-2 Data to Analyze Anthropogenic CO₂ Hotspots:

First Preliminary Results

Janne Hakkarainen (1), Iolanda Ialongo (1), and Johanna Tamminen (1)

(1) Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI)

NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) was launched on 2 July 2014 to monitor global atmospheric concentration and flux of CO₂ from space. As of March 2016, the instrument has collected more than one year of data. In this paper, we utilize this data record to analyze hotspots of anthropogenic CO₂ sources. Our aim is to utilize advanced techniques developed to analyze spaceborne nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) and sulfur dioxide (SO₂)—both short-lived atmospheric trace gases with both anthropogenic and natural sources—datasets. Unfortunately, trends, seasonality, long lifetime, and large atmospheric background significantly complicate the analysis of CO₂ hotspots. Our methodology is based on simultaneously deseasonalizing and detrending the data, and then mapping the remaining—the so-called anomaly data—to a grid.  

In this paper, we show that the main anthropogenic pollution regions like eastern USA, Central Europe, East Asia, and Middle East are easily detectable from our OCO-2 CO₂ anomaly maps. In addition, also smaller sources are visible. In order to better understand CO₂ anomaly maps, we simultaneously analyze the established NO₂ and SO₂ maps—observed by Dutch-Finnish Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) onboard NASA’s Aura spacecraft—and use these data records also to qualitatively validate our results. In future, as the OCO-2 data record gets longer, we hope to individually detect all the Megacities.

Keywords: OCO-2, carbon dioxide, anthropogenic emissions, hotspots, validation, OMI, nitrogen dioxide