From the Globe to Building: Fossil Fuel CO2 Emissions Information System
Carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuel remains the largest component of greenhouse gas emissions to the earth’s atmosphere. The need to quantify this flux in much finer space and time resolution has necessitated advances in measurement and modeling over the past two decades. In this presentation, I will describe an approach to space/time-explicit quantification across three domains: globe, national, urban. I will emphasize the urban scale, describing current thinking on a complete CO2 information system that incorporates atmospheric measurement, transport modeling, and flux quantification from the bottom-up. I will provide current plans on two new urban efforts in Melbourne, Australia and Auckland New Zealand.
Kevin Gurney is an Atmospheric Scientist, Ecologist and Policy expert currently working in the areas of carbon cycle science, climate science, and climate science policy at Northern Arizona University where he is a Professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems. He has degrees from UC Berkeley, MIT, and Colorado State University.
Gurney’s current research involves simulation of the global carbon cycle using the inverse approach, linkages between terrestrial carbon exchange and climate variability, and deforestation and carbon/climate feedbacks. Most recently, he has worked on research characterizing fossil fuel CO2 emissions at the global (“FFDAS”), national (“Vulcan”) and urban (“Hestia”) scales. Using data mining and innovative algorithms, these greenhouse gas quantification efforts are being used by analysts, scientists, and governments and are a core component of the NASA-led Carbon Monitoring System. The urban work, in particular, is anchoring new efforts at NASA and the National Institute for Standards and Technology to develop urban-focussed carbon monitoring and modeling.
Gurney is an IPCC lead author, an NSF CAREER award recipient, Sigma Xi Young Scientist recipient, a Fulbright scholar, and has published over 120 peer-reviewed scientific articles with multiple papers in Nature and Science and a book from MIT Press, Mending the Ozone Hole.