“CO₂-USA” Network

The third CO2-USA workshop will be in Boston, MA on Oct 7-8, 2019. Click here for workshop information and registration.

Principal Investigators: John Lin, Lucy Hutyra, Steven Wofsy, Christopher Loughner

Project Summary

Cities have emerged as leaders in US efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but the scientific knowledge to quantitatively track emissions and assess the efficacy of mitigation is lacking. As the global population increasingly resides in urban regions, scientific knowledge about how much, where, and why a particular city emits carbon becomes increasingly important.  This workshop launches a collaborative network to exchange information on community standards and common measurements, facilitate data sharing, and create analysis frameworks and cross-city syntheses to catalyze a new generation of researchers and enable new collaborations tackling important objectives that are difficult to address in isolation.  Specifically this synthesis effort seeks to:

• Quantify & understand similarities/differences in CO₂ and CH₄ fluxes across cities;
• Develop harmonized CO₂ and CH₄ mixing ratio datasets that are readily useable, traceable, and accessible by the research community and the public;
• Construct an atmospheric modeling system that is scalable and transferable between cities;
• Compare & understand similarities/differences between anthropogenic emission inventories;
• Improve estimates of biospheric fluxes across cities;
• Foster a community of urban carbon cycle researchers and generate collaborative studies;
• Engage stakeholders to link them with data, syntheses, and insights into urban emissions.

Supported through NOAA AC4 with workshop support from NIST