Anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are a dominant source of uncertainty in the global carbon budget. Reporting programs, like the united nations framework convention on climate change, often…

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) awarded a $126,000.00 grant to the University of Arizona, doing business as the Arizona Board of Regents, to demonstrate the feasibility of monitoring carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from global power plants using satellite remote sensing. The project aims to quantify how much the emissions from this population of point sources deviates from existing bottom-up global inventories, and establish the threshold for detectable CO2 point sources. This work will help build a scalable data system for integrating observations from future satellite missions focused on greenhouse gas monitoring, which will be especially valuable for improving emissions estimates in the developing world where inventory data is limited. The University of Arizona is a public research university, 1862 land grant institution, and Hispanic Serving Institution located in Tucson, Arizona. This grant does not have a set-aside designation.

Anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are a dominant source of uncertainty in the global carbon budget. Reporting programs, like the united nations framework convention on climate change, often lack robust measurement validation, and are unlikely to keep pace with rapidly changing infrastructure, particularly in the developing world. Global inventories of fossil CO2 emissions often rely on accounting of fuel consumption, population dynamics, and other activity data. These factors result in an estimated uncertainty of global anthropogenic CO2 emissions in excess of 1.0 GTC/YR. Point source emissions (e.g., CO2 from coal-fired power plants) drive more than one third of the anthropogenic budget, so uncertainty reduction for these CO2 point sources would have a major impact on reconciling global fossil fuel CO2 emissions. Whether we can reduce this uncertainty using space-based remote sensing is an open question. With active targeting of existing satellites, we can determine how much of the anthropogenic CO2 budget can be constrained with current capabilities, and how much more information we can anticipate with future planned missions. Quantifying and ultimately reducing CO2 emissions from strong discrete point sources is an urgent climate mitigation priority. This investigation will demonstrate the feasibility of monitoring CO2 emissions from global power plants using satellite remote sensing. By extensively analyzing retrieved CO2 information from a subset of global facilities, the project plans to answer (1) how much this population deviates from bottom-up global inventories, and (2) the threshold for point sources we can detect, establishing an empirical detection limit. Through the proposed data analysis framework, a data system will be built that will be scalable for future satellite missions (CO2M, geocarb, microcarb, gems, tempo, SBG, and chime, etc.). Developing the framework with sensors currently on-orbit and validating extensively with cems will instill confidence in methods, as we integrate new satellite sensor observations. This will be especially important for observations of CO2 point source emissions in the developing world, where there is poor bottom up or inventory knowledge of CO2 emissions.