Temporal and Spatial Distribution of Carbon Emissions

Abstract

In the early stages of research in climate change, the focus was on the quantification of global and regional carbon cycles. At this stage, the accurate determination of location and time of emissions played a less prominent role. But with the growing need for verification experiments and prior information for atmospheric transport models (Chaps. 3, 12) to underpin and support policy development, and thus the application of climate and atmospheric dispersion models, it became evident that both anthropogenic and biogenic carbon emissions had to be provided in a spatial and temporal resolution matching the requirements of said models. The methodology for the temporal and spatial resolution of anthropogenic emissions, in general, has been around for some time. Some of the techniques described in the following sections have, for instance, been developed for the application of atmospheric dispersion models to quantify acid deposition and ambient air concentrations of tropospheric ozone. One major activity during the 1990s in this field has been the work within the EUROTRAC subproject Generation and Evaluation of Emission Data (GENEMIS), which has been documented in Friedrich and Reis (2004).