PARIS - Process Attribution of Regional emISsions

PARIS is a 4-year Horizon Europe research project that aims to significantly increase our knowledge about the emissions of climate forcers from 8 European countries. PARIS focuses on the interface between bottom-up and top-down approaches and aims to strengthen the collaboration between scientists and national inventory teams for the evaluation and development of national inventories.

Seventeen European partners will work together to quantify emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases (F-gases), and black carbon.  To engage inventory teams early in the project, we focus early on emission estimates for fluorinated gases (F-gases), which have relatively simple source distributions, but poorly understood magnitudes. For greenhouse gases with a more complex mixture of sources, methane and carbon dioxide, research in PARIS focuses on the attribution of fluxes to particular sources and sinks. We will advance isotopologue measurements and multi-tracer analysis methods for source characterization, providing inventory teams with new information to target areas of uncertainty. For nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas for which most European inventories rely on highly simplified and uncertain bottom-up methods, two process-level models will be advanced to produce time- and space-resolved estimates that will be evaluated against isotopic data. For the important, but complex, climate forcers, organic matter aerosol and black carbon, we will take the next steps required towards robust top-down emissions inference by developing source apportionment methods. To generate maximum impact, we will synthesise our efforts in the form of draft annual Annexes to National Inventory Reports (NIRs) for eight European PARIS focus countries.

The overall objectives of PARIS are:

1) Quantify top-down emissions from a selection of European countries of all the major GHGs reported under the UNFCCC (CO2, CH4, N2O and F-gases), and black carbon aerosol (BC) reported under CLRTAP.

2) Quantify the contribution of major source sectors of GHG and BC emissions and organic matter aerosol (OM) abundance through the implementation of innovative measurement and analysis technologies.

3) Derive time- and space-resolved flux estimates for GHGs with complex or uncertain source distributions (N2O, F-gases)

4) Produce draft Annexes to the annual National Inventory Reports (NIRs) for a selection of ‘focus’ countries.

This presentation will give a general overview of the PARIS project, its objectives and implementation. It aims to introduce the project to the scientific community, and to set up a network for future collaborations with related projects, e.g.EYE-CLIMA (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101081395) or AVENGERS (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101081322).