Mapping Urban Greenhouse Gases down to the Street Level

Quantification of Fossil Fuel CO2 Emissions on the Building/Street Scale for a Large U.S. City(Abstract, Kevin R. Gurney, Igor Razlivanov, Yang Song, Yuyu Zhou, Bedrich Benes, and Michel Abdul-Massih, Environ. Sci. Technol., Aug. 15, 2012)

Also discussed here: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Mapped to Building, Street Level for U.S. Cities(ScienceDaily, Oct. 9, 2012)

 Today we review research aimed at mapping greenhouse gases in cities down to the scale of streets using a variety of surface data which in turn permits agencies to monitor and identify sources of emission across the urban landscape. This “ground” data is to be used in conjunction with a satellite to ne lanced in 2013 that will permit the implementation of effective greenhouse gas legislation at ultimately the global level.

 

Key Quotes:

 “this research effort is the first to use bottom-up methods to quantify all fossil fuel CO2 emissions down to the scale of individual buildings, road segments, and industrial/electricity production facilities on an hourly basis for an entire urban landscape”

"Cities have had little information with which to guide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions -- and you can't reduce what you can't measure,"

 “hope to ultimately map the CO2 emissions in all major cities across the United States, which accounts for nearly one-quarter of all global CO2 emissions”

 “We compare the natural gas component of our fossil fuel CO2 emissions estimate to consumption data provided by the local gas utility. At the zip code level, we achieve a bias-adjusted Pearson r correlation value of 0.92”

 "Hestia offers practical information we can use to identify the most cost-effective ways to reduce emissions and track progress over time,"

“Hestia is part of a larger effort that combines information about emissions with ground and satellite-based measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration… expected to complement NASA's planned December 2013 launch of the Orbital Carbon Observatory satellite, which will measure the concentration of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere”

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