The CO2 Human Emissions (CHE) Project: First Steps Towards a European Operational Capacity to Monitor Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions

• Main Authors: Gianpaolo Balsamo, Richard Engelen, Daniel Thiemert, Anna Agusti-Panareda, Nicolas Bousserez, Grégoire Broquet, Dominik Brunner, Michael Buchwitz, Frédéric Chevallier, Margarita Choulga, Hugo Denier Van Der Gon, Liesbeth Florentie, Jean-Matthieu Haussaire, Greet Janssens-Maenhout, Matthew W. Jones, Thomas Kaminski, Maarten Krol, Corinne Le Quéré, Julia Marshall, Joe McNorton, Pascal Prunet, Maximilian Reuter, Wouter Peters, Marko Scholze
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-09-01
• Series: Frontiers in Remote Sensing
• Subjects: carbon dioxide monitoring; green house gas emission; earth system approach; paris agreement; global stocktake
• Online Access: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsen.2021.707247/full

The Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is a binding international treaty signed by 196 nations to limit their greenhouse gas emissions through ever-reducing Nationally Determined Contributions and a system of 5-yearly Global Stocktakes in an Enhanced Transparency Framework. To support this process, the European Commission initiated the design and development of a new Copernicus service element that will use Earth observations mainly to monitor anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The CO2 Human Emissions (CHE) project has been successfully coordinating efforts of its 22 consortium partners, to advance the development of a European CO2 monitoring and verification support (CO2MVS) capacity for anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Several project achievements are presented and discussed here as examples. The CHE project has developed an enhanced capability to produce global, regional and local CO2 simulations, with a focus on the representation of anthropogenic sources. The project has achieved advances towards a CO2 global inversion capability at high resolution to connect atmospheric concentrations to surface emissions. CHE has also demonstrated the use of Earth observations (satellite and ground-based) as well as proxy data for human activity to constrain uncertainties and to enhance the timeliness of CO2 monitoring. High-resolution global simulations (at 9 km) covering the whole of 2015 (labelled CHE nature runs) fed regional and local simulations over Europe (at 5 km and 1 km resolution) and supported the generation of synthetic satellite observations simulating the contribution of a future dedicated Copernicus CO2 Monitoring Mission (CO2M).