Greenhouse gas inventory

Summary

Greenhouse gas inventories are emission inventories of greenhouse gas emissions that are developed for a variety of reasons. Scientists use inventories of natural and anthropogenic (human-caused) emissions as tools when developing atmospheric models. Policy makers use inventories to develop strategies and policies for emissions reductions and to track the progress of those policies. Regulatory agencies and corporations also rely on inventories to establish compliance records with allowable emission rates. Businesses, the public, and other interest groups use inventories to better understand the sources and trends in emissions. Unlike some other air emission inventories, greenhouse gas inventories include not only emissions from source categories, but also removals by carbon sinks. These removals are typically referred to as carbon sequestration. Greenhouse gas inventories typically use Global warming potential (GWP) values to combine emissions of various greenhouse gases into a single weighted value of emissions. Some of the key examples of greenhouse gas inventories include: All Annex I countries are required to report annual emissions and sinks of greenhouse gases under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) National governments that are Parties to the UNFCCC and/or the Kyoto Protocol are required to submit annual inventories of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions from sources and removals from sinks. The Kyoto Protocol includes additional requirements for national inventory systems, inventory reporting, and annual inventory review for determining compliance with Articles 5 and 8 of the Protocol. Project developers under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol prepare inventories as part of their project baselines. Scientific efforts aimed at understanding detail of total net carbon exchange. Example: Project Vulcan - a comprehensive US inventory of fossil-fuel greenhouse gas emissions.

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_inventory

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High-resolution hybrid inversion of IASI ammonia columns to constrain US ammonia emissions using the CMAQ adjoint model

Athanasios Nenes, Jennifer Kaiser

Ammonia (NH3) emissions have large impacts on air quality and nitrogen deposition, influencing human health and the well-being of sensitive ecosystems. Large uncertainties exist in the "bottom-up" NH3 emission inventories due to limited source information and a historical lack of measurements, hindering the assessment of NH3-related environmental impacts. The increasing capability of satellites to measure NH3 abundance and the development of modeling tools enable us to better constrain NH3 emission estimates at high spatial resolution. In this study, we constrain the NH3 emission estimates from the widely used 2011 National Emissions Inventory (2011 NEI) in the US using Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer NH3 column density measurements (IASI-NH3) gridded at a 36 km by 36 km horizontal resolution. With a hybrid inverse modeling approach, we use the Community Multiscale Air Quality Modeling System (CMAQ) and its multiphase adjoint model to optimize NH3 emission estimates in April, July, and October. Our optimized emission estimates suggest that the total NH3 emissions are biased low by 26 % in 2011 NEI in April with overestimation in the Midwest and underestimation in the Southern States. In July and October, the estimates from NEI agree well with the optimized emission estimates, despite a low bias in hotspot regions. Evaluation of the inversion performance using independent observations shows reduced underestimation in simulated ambient NH3 concentra- tion in all 3 months and reduced underestimation in NH4 wet deposition in April. Implementing the optimized NH3 emission estimates improves the model performance in simulating PM2.5 concentration in the Midwest in April. The model results suggest that the estimated contribution of ammonium nitrate would be biased high in a priori NEI-based assessments. The higher emission estimates in this study also imply a higher ecological impact of nitrogen deposition originating from NH3 emissions.

COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH2021

Methane is an important greenhouse gas that is emitted from multiple natural and anthropogenic sources. Atmospheric methane concentrations have varied on a number of time scales in the past, but what has caused these variations is not always well understood(1-8). The different sources and sinks of methane have specific isotopic signatures, and the isotopic composition of methane can therefore help to identify the environmental drivers of variations in atmospheric methane concentrations(9). Here we present high-resolution carbon isotope data (delta C-13 content) for methane from two ice cores from Greenland for the past two millennia. We find that the delta C-13 content underwent pronounced centennial-scale variations between 100 BC and AD 1600. With the help of two-box model calculations, we show that the centennial-scale variations in isotope ratios can be attributed to changes in pyrogenic and biogenic sources. We find correlations between these source changes and both natural climate variability-such as the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age-and changes in human population and land use, such as the decline of the Roman empire and the Han dynasty, and the population expansion during the medieval period.

Nature Publishing Group2012

High-resolution hybrid inversion of IASI ammonia columns to constrain US ammonia emissions using the CMAQ adjoint model

Athanasios Nenes, Jennifer Kaiser

COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH2021