Remote Sensing of Carbon Dioxide A Global and Regional Analysis.
Supervisor: Carlos Garcia-Soto (BEGIK Joint Research Unit IEO-UPV/EHU)
Carbon Dioxide is the most important driver of anthropogenic climate change which has inturn been recognized to significantly threaten the abiif he eah ciae system. Tomitigate the impacts of climate change, global agreements are urging countries to reduce theircarbon dioxide emissions. These reductions are reported to the United Nations FrameworkConvention on Climate Change under the Enhanced Transparency Framework by eachindividual country. However, no independent monitoring body is in place to validate thereported emission data and important emission sources such as cement manufacturing, landuse change or bunker fuel use are seldom included in self-reported data. These limitationscould be overcome by the use of satellite data to monitor regional CO2 emissions. Satellitesare able to collect information with dense spatial and temporal coverage and are comparablycheap to operate. Global dry air column averaged CO2 data have been collected since 2003.This work uses the Ensemble Median Algorithm dataset which provides data for the years2003-2018 to observe the satellite deduced spatiotemporal carbon dioxide distribution. Thefindings are compared to self-reported data and the Open-Data Inventory for AnthropogenicCarbon Dioxide to examine whether the satellites can detect important anthropogenicemission structures. Overall the trends in satellite derived atmospheric CO2 concentrations arein accordance with industrial and anthropogenic centers. The influence of bunker fuel usagefor international transportation and land use change can clearly be observed from the satellitedata suggesting the need to address these emissions in future agreements. Furthermore, someareas show a large natural impact on the carbon dioxide distribution which suggests a highimportance of the natural carbon cycle for future mitigation policies.