WORLD EMISSION

Pollutant and greenhouse gas emission inventories provide essential information for policy makers, governments and subsidiary bodies to evaluate progress towards emission abatement measures, and decide on future strategies. Inventories use different methodologies between countries, and have large uncertainties related to both activity data and emission factors. The use of satellite data, notably the imagery of the atmospheric composition, should enhance the accuracy, timeliness and the spatial and temporal resolution of inventories.

The European Space Agency (ESA)-funded WORLD EMISSION project kicked-off on 4th of March 2022 and will last two years. The project aims to provide an enhanced global emission monitoring service by developing top down emissions estimates based on satellite data. These estimates based on proven methodologies from the science community will be compared with bottom-up inventories, in close collaboration with end-user organisations, to define related product target requirements.

The WORLD EMISSION project team’s ambition is to achieve an emission inventory system with the following characteristics:

• Species to be monitored: CH4 (methane), CO2 (carbon dioxide), H2O (water vapour), NH3 (ammonia), SO2 (sulphur dioxide), NO2 (nitrogen dioxide), PM (particle matter), CO (carbon monoxide), CH3OH (methanol), CH2O (formaldehyde), CHOCHO (glyoxal), C5H8 (isoprene).
• Increase spatial and temporal resolution of existing inventories by introducing high resolution satellite data
• New processing framework that is capable to work globally (at least, capable to manage the heterogeneities of different regions) 
• Cover localized point source emissions from large industrial sites, hotspot emissions from oil, gas, and coal extraction basins  forest fires and megacities, and regional and national scale emissions
• Attribution of the anthropogenic sources to socioeconomic sectors
• Merge the specific processing stages of each specie into a unified flow

For more information on the project, contact Beatriz Revilla-Romero (brevilla@gmv.com)