Abstract
Abstract. Being the largest contributor to the global source of fossil-fuel CO2 emissions, China's emissions need to be accurately quantified and well understood. Previous studies have usually focused on the amount of national emissions and rarely discussed their spatiotemporal distributions, which are also crucial for both carbon flux and carbon management. In this study, we calculated China's CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use and industrial processes using provincial statistics and then mapped those emissions at 0.25° resolution on a monthly basis. Several key steps have been implemented to gain a better understanding of the spatiotemporal distributions, including (1) development and application of China's CO2 emission inventories using provincial statistics; (2) separate calculations of emissions from large point sources and accurate identification of their geographical locations; (3) development of 1 km × 1 km gridded population and GDP (gross domestic product) data for China from 2000 to 2009 and application of them as dynamic spatial proxies to allocate emissions; and (4) monthly variation curves of CO2 emissions from various sectors that were developed for each province and applied to our inventory. China's total CO2 emission from fossil fuels and industrial processes has increased from 3.6 billion tons in 2000 to 8.6 billion tons in 2009, which may be off by 14–18% and is enough to skew global totals. The resulting spatiotemporal distributions of our inventories also differed greatly in several ways from those derived using a national statistics and population-based approach for the various economic development levels, industrial and energy structures, and even large point emission sources within China and each province.
Highlights
CO2 emissions, which come from combustion of fossil fuel and industrial processes, are a major input to the global carbon cycle (Gregg et al, 2008)
The uncertainty ranges of total emissions have become wider since 2005 because the gaps between provincial and national energy consumption statistics become more significant from this year on, especially for coal consumption (Table S3)
We developed monthly emission curves at China’s provincial levels (Fig. 8b only showed some of them), and found each province has its own characteristics in monthly variations of CO2 emissions which can differ greatly with the na-692 tional average
Summary
CO2 emissions, which come from combustion of fossil fuel and industrial processes, are a major input to the global carbon cycle (Gregg et al, 2008). Existing emission estimates are usually made at national and regional level on annual basis (Boden et al, 2011; EIA, 2010; IEA, 2012; Olivier et al, 2011). Previous studies have argued that existing anthropogenic CO2 emission inventories may have potential biases (Gurney et al, 2005; Marland, 2012). For China, a recent study revealed that an 18 % gap of Chinese CO2 emissions corresponded to approximately 1.4 billion tons, which was greater than total emissions from Japan (Guan et al, 2012). Akimotoa et al (2006) suggested that there were substantial differences in energy consumption data for China between official statistics, and verified province-byprovince statistics data were in better agreement with satellite observations.
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