Inverting for emissions of carbon monoxide from Asia using aircraft observations over the western Pacific

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

We use aircraft observations of continental outflow over the western Pacific from the Transport and Chemical Evolution over the Pacific (TRACE‐P) mission (March–April 2001), in combination with an optimal estimation inverse model, to improve emission estimates of carbon monoxide (CO) from Asia. A priori emissions and their errors are from a customized bottom‐up Asian emission inventory for the TRACE‐P period. The global three‐dimensional GEOS‐CHEM chemical transport model (CTM) is used as the forward model. The CTM transport error (20–30% of the CO concentration) is quantified from statistics of the difference between the aircraft observations of CO and the forward model results with a priori emissions, after removing the mean bias which is attributed to errors in the a priori emissions. Additional contributions to the error budget in the inverse analysis include the representation error (typically 5% of the CO concentration) and the measurement accuracy (≃2% of the CO concentration). We find that the inverse model can usefully constrain five sources: Chinese fuel consumption, Chinese biomass burning, total emissions from Korea and Japan, total emissions from Southeast Asia, and the ensemble of all other sources. The inversion indicates a 54% increase in anthropogenic emissions from China (to 168 Tg CO yr−1) relative to the a priori; this value is still much lower than had been derived in previous inversions using the CMDL network of surface observations. A posteriori emissions of biomass burning in Southeast Asia and China are much lower than a priori estimates.