Improved monitoring of carbon dioxide emissions in Scandinavia using satellite and ground-based observations

The serious threat of climate change has prompted nations to take actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris Agreement. The implementation of the agreement relies on continuous follow-up of the emissions. At present, most emission estimates are based on inventories produced by statistical analyses of activity data.

These estimates often contain significant errors due to neglected processes and inappropriate assumptions in the calculations. This project proposes to develop a new method to provide independent estimates of fossil fuel emissions in Scandinavia.

The method is based on state-of-the-art data assimilation techniques to facilitate the use of high-resolution observations from existing and future satellites combined with ground-based measurements to derive the emissions.

The observations are linked to the carbon dioxide emissions through a convection-allowing atmospheric transport model and Bayesian inference.

I will focus on scientific questions of high relevance to the Scandinavian countries, such as how best to expand the current ground-based network to compensate for the drop of satellite observations in winter.

Finally, I will use the method fed by existing observations to derive measurement-based emission estimates for Sweden from 2018 onward.

This project will significantly advance our knowledge of how to use carbon dioxide satellite measurements and lays the groundwork for tracking Sweden’s progress to reach zero net emissions by 2045.