Vulcan and Hestia: High resolution quantification of fossil fuel CO2 emissions

Here we report on the Vulcan Project (vulcan.project.asu.edu/index.php), an effort to estimate fossil fuel CO2 emissions at local space/time scales through the use of "bottom-up", process-driven information. The Vulcan Project began as an answer to the need for a higher resolution North American fossil fuel CO2 emissions inventory. As a key component in the North American Carbon Program, Vulcan is now playing a critical role as a boundary constraint to inverse estimation of carbon sources and sinks. With the advent of denser CO2 monitoring, both in situ and remote, a higher resolution approach to inventory quantification is essential. The Vulcan Project has estimated United States fossil fuel CO2 emissions at the hourly time scale and at spatial scales below the county level (placed on a regular 10 km x 10 km grid) for the year 2002. Vulcan is built from a wide variety of observational data streams including regulated air pollutant emissions reporting, traffic monitoring, energy statistics, and US census data. In addition to these data sets, Vulcan relies on a series of modeling assumptions and constructs to interpolate in space, time and transform non-CO2 reporting into an estimate of CO2 combustion emissions. The recent version 2.0 of the Vulcan inventory has produced advances in a number of categories with particular emphasis on improved temporal structure. Onroad transportation emissions now avail of roughly 5000 automated traffic count monitors allowing for much improved diurnal and weekly time structure in our onroad transportation emissions. The Vulcan data product has been used for a regional inversion in the US and the potential bias correction from the utilization of previous fossil fuel CO2 emission data products is as high as 100% for large coherent regions in the United States. This emphasizes the potential for biased fossil fuel CO2 inventories to impact inverse results. Vulcan has also generated interest from decision-making communities and is now attempting to meet a variety of CO2 mitigation goals by providing process detail on emissions activities. This has led to the Hestia effort in which quantification has been attempted down to the individual building level within a single urban domain (Indianapolis, USA). A partner project, INFLUX, has begun in which the Hestia inventory is combined with aircraft monitoring and flux tower instrumentation to attempt the first urban-level bottom-up/top-down comparison. As with Vulcan, the Hestia effort has a variety of decision-support spin-offs including urban planning, energy efficiency planning in addition to CO2 mitigation planning at the urban/street level. Scoping has also begun on performing a Hestia approach for Los Angeles.