Abstract
Abstract. The UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) requires the nations of the world to report their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The independent verification of these reported emissions is a cornerstone for advancing towards the emission accounting and reduction measures agreed upon in the Paris Agreement. In this paper, we present the concept and first performance assessment of a compact spaceborne imaging spectrometer with a spatial resolution of 50×50 m2 that could contribute to the “monitoring, verification and reporting” (MVR) of CO2 emissions worldwide. CO2 emissions from medium-sized power plants (1–10 Mt CO2 yr−1), currently not targeted by other spaceborne missions, represent a significant part of the global CO2 emission budget. In this paper we show that the proposed instrument concept is able to resolve emission plumes from such localized sources as a first step towards corresponding CO2 flux estimates. Through radiative transfer simulations, including a realistic instrument noise model and a global trial ensemble covering various geophysical scenarios, it is shown that an instrument noise error of 1.1 ppm (1σ) can be achieved for the retrieval of the column-averaged dry-air mole fraction of CO2 (XCO2). Despite a limited amount of information from a single spectral window and a relatively coarse spectral resolution, scattering by atmospheric aerosol and cirrus can be partly accounted for in the XCO2 retrieval, with deviations of at most 4.0 ppm from the true abundance for two-thirds of the scenes in the global trial ensemble. We further simulate the ability of the proposed instrument concept to observe CO2 plumes from single power plants in an urban area using high-resolution CO2 emission and surface albedo data for the city of Indianapolis. Given the preliminary instrument design and the corresponding instrument noise error, emission plumes from point sources with an emission rate down to the order of 0.3 Mt CO2 yr−1 can be resolved, i.e., well below the target source strength of 1 Mt CO2 yr−1. This leaves a significant margin for additional error sources, like scattering particles and complex meteorology, and shows the potential for subsequent CO2 flux estimates with the proposed instrument concept.
Highlights
Despite the broad consensus on the negative long-term effects of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and the efforts to reduce these emissions, the atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to rise
The spatial resolution of OCO-2 and similar instruments like OCO-3, TanSat and the planned Copernicus CO2 Monitoring mission CO2M does, pose a difficulty for the routine monitoring of localized power plant CO2 emissions, since the plume is usually only sampled by a handful of pixels in which CO2 plume enhancements cannot be fully separated from the background, making quantitative CO2 emission rate estimates difficult and vulnerable to cloud contamination and instrument noise propagating into CO2 retrieval errors
We present the concept of a compact spaceborne imaging spectrometer with a high spatial resolution of 50×50 m2 targeting the monitoring of localized CO2 emissions
Summary
Despite the broad consensus on the negative long-term effects of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and the efforts to reduce these emissions, the atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to rise. The spatial resolution of OCO-2 and similar instruments like OCO-3, TanSat and the planned Copernicus CO2 Monitoring mission CO2M (on the order of 2– 4 km2) does, pose a difficulty for the routine monitoring of localized power plant CO2 emissions, since the plume is usually only sampled by a handful of pixels in which CO2 plume enhancements cannot be fully separated from the background, making quantitative CO2 emission rate estimates difficult and vulnerable to cloud contamination and instrument noise propagating into CO2 retrieval errors For this reason CO2M will target isolated large power plants ( 10 Mt CO2 yr−1) and large urban agglomerations ( Berlin) (Kuhlmann et al, 2019), and a large fraction of the emission total will be missed.
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