Enhancing Urban GHG Monitoring: Progress of the NIST test-bed system

As the U.S. Metrology Institute, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has responded to the measurements and standards challenge of monitoring, reporting, and verifying greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from a broad range of sources, with an emphasis on urban environments, to: a) improve U.S. capabilities to measure GHG emissions accurately; b) demonstrate the capabilities of atmospheric urban monitoring networks (top-down or atmospheric measurement approaches) to determine quantitatively GHG fluxes from industrial, residential, transportation, power generation and other activities; c) complement such measurements with spatially explicit emissions modeling (bottom-up or emissions modeling) approaches based on socio-economic data; and d) demonstrate that the combination improves confidence in emission estimates while identifying areas of improvement. 

As part of these efforts, NIST established its first Urban Test Bed in Indianapolis, Indiana (the INFLUX Project) in 2010 with Purdue University, NOAA, and Penn State University collaborators. Additional testbeds were established in Los Angeles (2012) and the Northeast Corridor (2014) to test applicability of methodologies over a range of meteorological conditions and emissions profiles. In this talk, we summarize some of the results obtained where we demonstrated methodologies for biogenic emission and uptake processes estimation, network design and emissions quantification from dense tower-networks and aircraft measurements. In addition, we highlight current efforts to transfer the research to operations, facilitate the adoption of the techniques by developing lower cost monitoring stations, and promote transparency by consolidating the methods in open-source computational tools.