EGU21-13737
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-13737
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Application of a Spatially Explicit Scaling Factor Method on CO2 Emissions From New York

Kristian Hajny1,2, Cody Floerchinger3, Joseph Pitt2, Israel Lopez-Coto4, Jay Tomlin1, Robert Kaeser1, Brian Stirm5, Thilina Jayarathne1, Conor Gately3, Maryann Sargent3, Kevin Gurney6, Geoffrey Roest6, Alexander Turner7,8, Lucy Hutyra9, Paul Shepson1,2, and Steven Wofsy3
Kristian Hajny et al.
  • 1Purdue University, Department of Chemistry, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA
  • 2Stony Brook University, School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Stony Brook, New York, USA
  • 3Harvard University, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
  • 4Engineering Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gathersburg, Maryland, USA
  • 5Purdue University, School of Aviation and Transportation Technology, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA
  • 6Northern Arizona University, School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems, Flagstaff, Arizona, USA
  • 7University of California at Berkeley, Department of Earth and Planetary Science, Berkeley, California, USA
  • 8University of Washington, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Seattle, Washington, USA
  • 9Boston University, Department of Earth and Environment, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Assessing progress towards greenhouse gas mitigation targets in recent legislation requires reliable, precise methods for emissions quantification.  Top-down approaches can provide a complementary assessment to the bottom-up inventories typically used by cities.

In this work we have performed a series of 9 winter aircraft measurement flights downwind of New York City in 2018 – 2020.  We use dispersion modeling driven by publicly available meteorological products to calculate footprints relevant to the flight data.  To calculate modeled emissions, we combine these footprints with four CO2 inventories (ODIAC, EDGAR, ACES, and Vulcan) using a spatially explicit scaling factor approach.  We show that we can isolate the emissions from two areas of interest, New York City and the New York-Newark urban area, by using the fraction of modeled enhancements originating in said areas of interest as weighting functions.  We then calculate a scaling factor that optimizes agreement with measurements for each flight.  Here we discuss this technique and the posterior emissions for both areas of interest as compared to inversion analyses for the same areas.  We also quantify the variability across the ensemble including multiple meteorological products, scaling factor calculation methods, and mixing parameterizations across all inventories and flight days.

How to cite: Hajny, K., Floerchinger, C., Pitt, J., Lopez-Coto, I., Tomlin, J., Kaeser, R., Stirm, B., Jayarathne, T., Gately, C., Sargent, M., Gurney, K., Roest, G., Turner, A., Hutyra, L., Shepson, P., and Wofsy, S.: Application of a Spatially Explicit Scaling Factor Method on CO2 Emissions From New York, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-13737, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-13737, 2021.

Corresponding displays formerly uploaded have been withdrawn.