Global monthly gridded atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations under the historical and future scenarios

Wei Cheng,Sijian Jiang,Xinqi Zheng,Jing Peng,Haipeng Zhao,Li Dan,Demin Zhou,Xiaoyu Wang,Jing Tian,Jinming Feng,Zhu Liu,Xiangzheng Deng,Wei Qi,Yongli Wang

doi:10.1038/s41597-022-01196-7

Abstract

Increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations is the main driver of global warming due to fossil fuel combustion. Satellite observations provide continuous global CO2 retrieval products, that reveal the nonuniform distributions of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. However, climate simulation studies are almost based on a globally uniform mean or latitudinally resolved CO2 concentrations assumption. In this study, we reconstructed the historical global monthly distributions of atmospheric CO2 concentrations with 1° resolution from 1850 to 2013 which are based on the historical monthly and latitudinally resolved CO2 concentrations accounting longitudinal features retrieved from fossil-fuel CO2 emissions from Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center. And the spatial distributions of nonuniform CO2 under Shared Socio-economic Pathways and Representative Concentration Pathways scenarios were generated based on the spatial, seasonal and interannual scales of the current CO2 concentrations from 2015 to 2150. Including the heterogenous CO2 distributions could enhance the realism of global climate modeling, to better anticipate the potential socio-economic implications, adaptation practices, and mitigation of climate change.

Highlights

Background & SummaryRecent satellite retrievals provide a continuous global spatial products of both column CO2, e.g., from the Chinese Global Carbon Dioxide Monitoring Scientific Experimental Satellite (TanSat), the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) and the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT); and mid-tropospheric CO2, e.g., the atmospheric infrared sounder (AIRS), those reveal the nonuniform distributions of mid-tropospheric CO2 concentrations[1–6]
The areas with low atmospheric CO2 concentrations are in the high latitudes and the lack of any large CO2 emissions areas[1]
In the Beijing Normal University Earth System Model (BNU-ESM), the inhomogeneous CO2 simulations are driven by annual CO2 concentrations with spatial and seasonal changes derived from satellite observation[10]

Summary

Introduction

Background & SummaryRecent satellite retrievals provide a continuous global spatial products of both column CO2, e.g., from the Chinese Global Carbon Dioxide Monitoring Scientific Experimental Satellite (TanSat), the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) and the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT); and mid-tropospheric CO2, e.g., the atmospheric infrared sounder (AIRS), those reveal the nonuniform distributions of mid-tropospheric CO2 concentrations[1–6]. We provide global monthly distributions of atmospheric CO2 concentrations with 1° resolution under historical (1850–2013) and future (2015–2150) scenarios in CMIP6, which have equal global annual mean values in the CMIP6 standard CO2 dataset.

Results

Conclusion