ICOS Talks: Constraining European Fossil Fuel emission using atmospheric 14CO2 observations скачать в хорошем качестве

ICOS Talks: Constraining European Fossil Fuel emission using atmospheric 14CO2 observations

ICOS Talks is a series of online presentations and discussions by scientists, for scientists. These talks showcase groundbreaking greenhouse gas science topics facilitated by ICOS data. Learn more: https://www.icos-cp.eu/news-and-event... About the speaker Dr. rer. nat. Samuel Hammer is Head of the ICOS Central Radiocarbon Laboratory (CRL) at Heidelberg University. His research advances isotope-based methods to quantify fossil fuel CO₂ emissions from urban to continental scales. Abstract Atmospheric Δ¹⁴CO₂ provides a direct tracer for fossil fuel CO₂ because fossil emissions contain no radiocarbon. Using the Regional Isotope Budget Approach (RIBA), we assess the information content of ICOS Δ¹⁴CO₂ observations for constraining European fossil fuel emissions. ICOS data independently constrain fossil emissions, with the strongest constraints emerging for Central Western Europe (CWE). The analysis shows that expanding spatial coverage is more important than increasing sampling frequency. In inversion experiments, ICOS observations reduce an artificial ±10% prior bias to approximately ±3–4%. Absolute emission estimates for the CWE domain are within a few per cent of Global Carbon Project bottom-up estimates, but remain sensitive to the assumed Δ¹⁴CO₂ background.