skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: An approach for verifying biogenic greenhouse gas emissions inventories with atmospheric CO 2 concentration data

Abstract

Verifying national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventories is a critical step to ensure that reported emissions data to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are accurate and representative of a country’s contribution to GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. Verification could include a variety of evidence, but arguably the most convincing verification would be confirmation of a change in GHG concentrations in the atmosphere that is consistent with reported emissions to the UNFCCC. We report here on a case study evaluating this option based on a prototype atmospheric CO2 measurement network deployed in the Mid-Continent Region of the conterminous United States. We found that the atmospheric CO2 measurement data did verify the accuracy of the emissions inventory within the confidence limits of the emissions estimates, suggesting that this technology could be further developed and deployed more widely in the future for verifying reported emissions.

Authors:
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
Sponsoring Org.:
USDOE; National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
OSTI Identifier:
1182910
Report Number(s):
PNNL-SA-93358
Journal ID: ISSN 1748-9326; 400409900
Grant/Contract Number:  
NNX08AK08G; NNH12AU351; AC05-76RL01830
Resource Type:
Journal Article: Accepted Manuscript
Journal Name:
Environmental Research Letters
Additional Journal Information:
Journal Volume: 10; Journal Issue: 3; Journal ID: ISSN 1748-9326
Publisher:
IOP Publishing
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

Citation Formats

Ogle, Stephen, Davis, Kenneth J., Lauvaux, Thomas, Schuh, Andrew E., Cooley, Dan, West, Tristram O., Heath, L., Miles, Natasha, Richardson, S. J., Breidt, F. Jay, Smith, Jim, McCarty, Jessica L., Gurney, Kevin R., Tans, P. P., and Denning, Scott. An approach for verifying biogenic greenhouse gas emissions inventories with atmospheric CO 2 concentration data. United States: N. p., 2015. Web. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/034012.
Ogle, Stephen, Davis, Kenneth J., Lauvaux, Thomas, Schuh, Andrew E., Cooley, Dan, West, Tristram O., Heath, L., Miles, Natasha, Richardson, S. J., Breidt, F. Jay, Smith, Jim, McCarty, Jessica L., Gurney, Kevin R., Tans, P. P., & Denning, Scott. An approach for verifying biogenic greenhouse gas emissions inventories with atmospheric CO 2 concentration data. United States. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/034012
Ogle, Stephen, Davis, Kenneth J., Lauvaux, Thomas, Schuh, Andrew E., Cooley, Dan, West, Tristram O., Heath, L., Miles, Natasha, Richardson, S. J., Breidt, F. Jay, Smith, Jim, McCarty, Jessica L., Gurney, Kevin R., Tans, P. P., and Denning, Scott. 2015. "An approach for verifying biogenic greenhouse gas emissions inventories with atmospheric CO 2 concentration data". United States. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/034012. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1182910.
@article{osti_1182910,
title = {An approach for verifying biogenic greenhouse gas emissions inventories with atmospheric CO 2 concentration data},
author = {Ogle, Stephen and Davis, Kenneth J. and Lauvaux, Thomas and Schuh, Andrew E. and Cooley, Dan and West, Tristram O. and Heath, L. and Miles, Natasha and Richardson, S. J. and Breidt, F. Jay and Smith, Jim and McCarty, Jessica L. and Gurney, Kevin R. and Tans, P. P. and Denning, Scott},
abstractNote = {Verifying national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventories is a critical step to ensure that reported emissions data to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are accurate and representative of a country’s contribution to GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. Verification could include a variety of evidence, but arguably the most convincing verification would be confirmation of a change in GHG concentrations in the atmosphere that is consistent with reported emissions to the UNFCCC. We report here on a case study evaluating this option based on a prototype atmospheric CO2 measurement network deployed in the Mid-Continent Region of the conterminous United States. We found that the atmospheric CO2 measurement data did verify the accuracy of the emissions inventory within the confidence limits of the emissions estimates, suggesting that this technology could be further developed and deployed more widely in the future for verifying reported emissions.},
doi = {10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/034012},
url = {https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1182910}, journal = {Environmental Research Letters},
issn = {1748-9326},
number = 3,
volume = 10,
place = {United States},
year = {Tue Mar 10 00:00:00 EDT 2015},
month = {Tue Mar 10 00:00:00 EDT 2015}
}

Journal Article:
Free Publicly Available Full Text
Publisher's Version of Record

Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 23 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

Save / Share:

Works referenced in this record:

Measurements of carbon dioxide on very tall towers: results of the NOAA/CMDL program
journal, November 1998


Global CO 2 fluxes estimated from GOSAT retrievals of total column CO 2
journal, January 2013


Significant efflux of carbon dioxide from streams and rivers in the United States
journal, October 2011


Factoring out natural and indirect human effects on terrestrial carbon sources and sinks
journal, June 2007


A constrained least-squares approach to combine bottom-up and top-down CO2 flux estimates
journal, July 2012


Assessing the impact of crops on regional CO 2 fluxes and atmospheric concentrations
journal, January 2010


Regional US carbon sinks from three-dimensional atmospheric CO2 sampling
journal, October 2010


The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) mission
journal, January 2004


Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt
journal, February 2008


Atmospheric inverse modeling to constrain regional-scale CO 2 budgets at high spatial and temporal resolution
journal, January 2010


Towards robust regional estimates of CO2 sources and sinks using atmospheric transport models
journal, February 2002


High Resolution Fossil Fuel Combustion CO 2 Emission Fluxes for the United States
journal, July 2009


The need for “apples-to-apples” comparisons of carbon dioxide source and sink estimates
journal, October 2012


Role of simulated GOSAT total column CO 2 observations in surface CO 2 flux uncertainty reduction
journal, January 2009


Sources of variations in total column carbon dioxide
journal, January 2011


North American carbon dioxide sources and sinks: magnitude, attribution, and uncertainty
journal, December 2012

  • King, Anthony W.; Hayes, Daniel J.; Huntzinger, Deborah N.
  • Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Vol. 10, Issue 10
  • https://doi.org/10.1890/120066

Constraining the CO 2 budget of the corn belt: exploring uncertainties from the assumptions in a mesoscale inverse system
journal, January 2012


Network design for mesoscale inversions of CO 2 sources and sinks
journal, January 2012


Planetary boundary layer errors in mesoscale inversions of column-integrated CO 2 measurements
journal, January 2014


The spatial and temporal distribution of crop residue burning in the contiguous United States
journal, October 2009


Remote Sensing-Based Estimates of Annual and Seasonal Emissions from Crop Residue Burning in the Contiguous United States
journal, January 2011


Large amplitude spatial and temporal gradients in atmospheric boundary layer CO 2 mole fractions detected with a tower-based network in the U.S. upper Midwest : CO
journal, February 2012


Inverse modeling of CO 2 sources and sinks using satellite observations of CO 2 from TES and surface flask measurements
journal, January 2011


Carbon storage and sequestration by trees in urban and community areas of the United States
journal, July 2013


Scale and uncertainty in modeled soil organic carbon stock changes for US croplands using a process-based model
journal, February 2010


An atmospheric perspective on North American carbon dioxide exchange: CarbonTracker
journal, November 2007


Evaluation of continental carbon cycle simulations with North American flux tower observations
journal, November 2013


Field Testing of Cavity Ring-Down Spectroscopy Analyzers Measuring Carbon Dioxide and Water Vapor
journal, March 2012


A Shrinkage Approach to Large-Scale Covariance Matrix Estimation and Implications for Functional Genomics
journal, January 2005


Evaluating atmospheric CO 2 inversions at multiple scales over a highly inventoried agricultural landscape
journal, March 2013


Carbon factors and models for forest carbon estimates for the 2005–2011 National Greenhouse Gas Inventories of the United States
journal, November 2013


Greenhouse gas mitigation in agriculture
journal, September 2007


Atmospheric CO 2 monitoring with single-cell NDIR-based analyzers
journal, January 2011


Observational Contrains on the Global Atmospheric Co2 Budget
journal, March 1990


Warsaw talks to thrash out UN climate roadmap
journal, November 2013


Cropland carbon fluxes in the United States: increasing geospatial resolution of inventory-based carbon accounting
journal, June 2010


Regional uptake and release of crop carbon in the United States
journal, January 2011


A continuous measure of gross primary production for the conterminous United States derived from MODIS and AmeriFlux data
journal, March 2010


Works referencing / citing this record:

High-resolution atmospheric inversion of urban CO 2 emissions during the dormant season of the Indianapolis Flux Experiment (INFLUX) : URBAN INVERSION
journal, May 2016


Large Uncertainties in Urban-Scale Carbon Emissions: Uncertainties in Urban Carbon Emissions
journal, October 2017


Carbon and energy fluxes in cropland ecosystems: a model-data comparison
journal, June 2016


Anthropogenic CO2 emissions from a megacity in the Yangtze River Delta of China
journal, June 2018


Top-Down Constraints on Anthropogenic CO 2 Emissions Within an Agricultural-Urban Landscape
journal, May 2018


Seasonal Characteristics of Model Uncertainties From Biogenic Fluxes, Transport, and Large‐Scale Boundary Inflow in Atmospheric CO 2 Simulations Over North America
journal, December 2019


The Indianapolis Flux Experiment (INFLUX): A test-bed for developing urban greenhouse gas emission measurements
journal, February 2017