Greenhouse Gas Monitoring in the Northeast Corridor

Cities contribute ~70% of the global anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with projections of population growth patterns indicating that this fraction is likely to rise in the future. Cities are also at the forefront of developing sustainability plans with ambitious goals for reducing their own GHG emissions through various efforts, such as investing in public transportation, tree planting, renewable energy sources, etc. Yet policy makers are in need of actionable information that will help them decide where their efforts are most likely to have the highest impact. The magnitude and distribution of some types of emissions is not well known, especially for methane emission sources, which are highly uncertain in urban regions. Atmospheric measurements of GHG concentrations can give valuable insight into the processes, trends, and magnitudes of urban and other regional emissions of these gases.

In 2015, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched a new GHG measurement project focused on quantifying carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emissions from the metropolitan areas of Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC, and surrounding suburban communities. This urban testbed (the Northeast Corridor/Baltimore-Washington -NEC/BW) project joins two previously established NIST-sponsored urban testbeds located in Indianapolis (the Indianapolis Flux Experiment, INFLUX) and Los Angeles (the LA Megacity Carbon Project). These urban testbeds use dense observations from multiple platforms to develop methods for trace gas flux estimation in urban regions. The NEC/BW project is a collaboration between NIST and the University of Maryland, Stony Brook and Purdue Universities, NOAA, Earth Networks, and Northern Arizona University. Specifically, the NEC/BW is the location of the Urban Prototype inversion system, a collaboration between NIST and NOAA’s Air Resources Laboratory, and part of Phase I of the U.S. National Strategy to Advance an Integrated U.S. Greenhouse Gas Measurement, Monitoring, and Information System (GHGMMIS).

This presentation will give a background of atmospheric GHG measurements in the Northeast Corridor, as well as an overview of progress, future plans, and goals for the various measurement and modeling project elements underway.