Abstract
Abstract. The Utah Urban CO2 Network (UUCON) is a network of near-surface atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) measurement sites aimed at quantifying long-term changes in urban and rural locations throughout northern Utah since 2001. We document improvements to UUCON made in 2015 that increase measurement precision, standardize sampling protocols, and expand the number of measurement locations to represent a larger region in northern Utah. In a parallel effort, near-surface CO2 and methane (CH4) measurement sites were assembled as part of the Uintah Basin greenhouse gas (GHG) network in a region of oil and natural gas extraction located in northeastern Utah. Additional efforts have resulted in automated quality control, calibration, and visualization of data through utilities hosted online (https://air.utah.edu, last access: 22 August 2019). These improvements facilitate atmospheric modeling efforts and quantify atmospheric composition in urban and rural locations throughout northern Utah. Here we present an overview of the instrumentation design and methods within UUCON and the Uintah Basin GHG networks as well as describe and report measurement uncertainties using a broadly applicable and novel method. Historic and modern data described in this paper are archived with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and can be found at https://doi.org/10.7289/V50R9MN2 (Mitchell et al., 2018c) and https://doi.org/10.25921/8vaj-bk51 (Bares et al., 2018a) respectively.
Highlights
Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by anthropogenic fossil fuel combustion is the primary driver of rising global temperatures (IEA, 2015), which has led to international commitment to reduce total carbon emissions
The aim of this paper is to describe the Utah Urban CO2 Network (UUCON) and Uintah Basin greenhouse gas (GHG) measurement procedures, site locations, and data structure with sufficient detail to provide documentation for analyses using these datasets, thereby serving as an indepth method reference
The infrared absorption band utilized by the Li-6262s deployed in the UUCON network is broadened by the presence of H2O resulting in a decrease in the measured CO2 mole fraction
Summary
Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by anthropogenic fossil fuel combustion is the primary driver of rising global temperatures (IEA, 2015), which has led to international commitment to reduce total carbon emissions. Cities around the world have launched efforts to establish urban near-surface CO2 monitoring observatories for top-down emission estimates and for modeling validation efforts similar to the UUCON network (Mitchell et al, 2018b) These cities include Los Angeles (Duren and Miller, 2012; Newman et al, 2013; Verhulst et al, 2017), Indianapolis (Turnbull et al, 2015), Paris (Bréon et al, 2015; Staufer et al, 2016), Rome (Gratani and Varone, 2005), Davos, Switzerland (Lauvaux et al, 2013), Portland (Rice and Bostrom, 2011), and Boston (Sargent et al, 2018), among others (Duren and Miller, 2012). This unique method does not require the presence of a target tank within the dataset, allowing for it to be broadly applicable to many trace gas and air quality datasets that are limited to calibration information alone
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