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Title: Los Angeles megacity: a high-resolution land–atmosphere modelling system for urban CO2 emissions

Journal Article · · Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (Online)
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [3];  [4];  [5];  [5];  [3];  [6];  [7];  [8];  [8];  [6];  [3];  [3];  [8];  [8];  [3];  [8];  [3] more »;  [3] « less
  1. Univ. of California, Los Angeles, CA (United States); California Inst. of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States); Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA (United States)
  2. Pennsylvania State Univ., State College, PA (United States); California Inst. of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)
  3. California Inst. of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)
  4. Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO (United States); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Boulder, CO (United States)
  5. Pennsylvania State Univ., State College, PA (United States)
  6. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
  7. Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena (Germany)
  8. Arizona State Univ., Tempe, AZ (United States)
+ Show Author Affiliations

Megacities are major sources of anthropogenic fossil fuel CO2 (FFCO2) emissions. The spatial extents of these large urban systems cover areas of 10 000 km2 or more with complex topography and changing landscapes. We present a high-resolution land–atmosphere modelling system for urban CO2 emissions over the Los Angeles (LA) megacity area. The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF)-Chem model was coupled to a very high-resolution FFCO2 emission product, Hestia-LA, to simulate atmospheric CO2 concentrations across the LA megacity at spatial resolutions as fine as ~1 km. We evaluated multiple WRF configurations, selecting one that minimized errors in wind speed, wind direction, and boundary layer height as evaluated by its performance against meteorological data collected during the CalNex-LA campaign (May–June 2010). Our results show no significant difference between moderate-resolution (4 km) and high-resolution (1.3 km) simulations when evaluated against surface meteorological data, but the high-resolution configurations better resolved planetary boundary layer heights and vertical gradients in the horizontal mean winds. We coupled our WRF configuration with the Vulcan 2.2 (10 km resolution) and Hestia-LA (1.3 km resolution) fossil fuel CO2 emission products to evaluate the impact of the spatial resolution of the CO2 emission products and the meteorological transport model on the representation of spatiotemporal variability in simulated atmospheric CO2 concentrations. We find that high spatial resolution in the fossil fuel CO2 emissions is more important than in the atmospheric model to capture CO2 concentration variability across the LA megacity. Finally, we present a novel approach that employs simultaneous correlations of the simulated atmospheric CO2 fields to qualitatively evaluate the greenhouse gas measurement network over the LA megacity. Spatial correlations in the atmospheric CO2 fields reflect the coverage of individual measurement sites when a statistically significant number of sites observe emissions from a specific source or location. We conclude that elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the LA megacity are composed of multiple fine-scale plumes rather than a single homogenous urban dome. Furthermore, we conclude that FFCO2 emissions monitoring in the LA megacity requires FFCO2 emissions modelling with ~1 km resolution because coarser-resolution emissions modelling tends to overestimate the observational constraints on the emissions estimates.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-05CH11231
OSTI ID:
1415960
Journal Information:
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (Online), Vol. 16, Issue 14; ISSN 1680-7324
Publisher:
European Geosciences UnionCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 79 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (24)

Large Uncertainties in Urban-Scale Carbon Emissions: Uncertainties in Urban Carbon Emissions journal October 2017
Errors and uncertainties in a gridded carbon dioxide emissions inventory journal July 2019
Comparison of Global Downscaled Versus Bottom‐Up Fossil Fuel CO 2 Emissions at the Urban Scale in Four U.S. Urban Areas journal March 2019
A Comparative Analysis of Anthropogenic CO 2 Emissions at City Level Using OCO‐2 Observations: A Global Perspective journal September 2019
Anthropogenic and biogenic CO 2 fluxes in the Boston urban region journal July 2018
Reducing errors in aircraft atmospheric inversion estimates of point-source emissions: the Aliso Canyon natural gas leak as a natural tracer experiment journal March 2018
Assessing fossil fuel CO 2 emissions in California using atmospheric observations and models journal May 2018
Estimating power plant CO 2 emission using OCO-2 XCO 2 and high resolution WRF-Chem simulations journal July 2019
Assessing Lagrangian inverse modelling of urban anthropogenic CO2 fluxes using in situ aircraft and ground-based measurements in the Tokyo area journal May 2019
Numerical simulation of atmospheric CO2 concentration and flux over the Korean Peninsula using WRF-VPRM model during Korus-AQ 2016 campaign journal January 2020
Carbon dioxide and methane measurements from the Los Angeles Megacity Carbon Project – Part 1: calibration, urban enhancements, and uncertainty estimates journal January 2017
Impact of physical parameterizations and initial conditions on simulated atmospheric transport and CO2 mole fractions in the US Midwest journal January 2018
Estimates of CO2 fluxes over the city of Cape Town, South Africa, through Bayesian inverse modelling journal January 2018
Analysis of temporal and spatial variability of atmospheric CO2 concentration within Paris from the GreenLITE™ laser imaging experiment journal January 2019
Calibration of a multi-physics ensemble for estimating the uncertainty of a greenhouse gas atmospheric transport model journal January 2019
Modelling CO 2 weather – why horizontal resolution matters journal January 2019
An atmospheric inversion over the city of Cape Town: sensitivity analyses journal January 2019
The Open-source Data Inventory for Anthropogenic CO 2 , version 2016 (ODIAC2016): a global monthly fossil fuel CO 2 gridded emissions data product for tracer transport simulations and surface flux inversions journal January 2018
The Hestia fossil fuel CO2 emissions data product for the Los Angeles megacity (Hestia-LA) journal January 2019
A Lagrangian approach towards extracting signals of urban CO2 emissions from satellite observations of atmospheric column CO2 (XCO2): X-Stochastic Time-Inverted Lagrangian Transport model (“X-STILT v1”) journal January 2018
The Canadian atmospheric transport model for simulating greenhouse gas evolution on regional scales: GEM–MACH–GHG v.137-reg journal January 2020
Spatio‐temporally Resolved Methane Fluxes From the Los Angeles Megacity journal May 2019
Spaceborne detection of localized carbon dioxide sources journal October 2017
Characterizing uncertainties in atmospheric inversions of fossil fuel CO2 emissions in California journal January 2019

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