Quantifying methane and nitrous oxide emissions from the UK and Ireland using a national-scale monitoring network

Ganesan, A. L.; Manning, A. J.; Grant, A.; Young, D.; Oram, D .E.; Sturges, W. T.; Moncrieff, J. B.; O'Doherty, S.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-15-6393-2015

Articles | Volume 15, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-15-6393-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-15-6393-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 15, issue 11

Research article

|

11 Jun 2015

Research article |

| 11 Jun 2015

Quantifying methane and nitrous oxide emissions from the UK and Ireland using a national-scale monitoring network

A. L. Ganesan, A. J. Manning, A. Grant, D. Young, D .E. Oram, W. T. Sturges, J. B. Moncrieff, and S. O'Doherty

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Final revised paper (published on 11 Jun 2015)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 09 Jan 2015)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC C18: 'Review of Ganesan et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 23 Jan 2015
- AC C701: 'Response to Referee 1', Anita Ganesan, 12 Mar 2015
RC C177: 'Reviewer comment', Anonymous Referee #2, 12 Feb 2015
- AC C716: 'Response to Referee #2', Anita Ganesan, 12 Mar 2015
RC C274: 'review of paper by Ganesan et al.', Anonymous Referee #3, 18 Feb 2015
- AC C724: 'Response to Referee #3', Anita Ganesan, 12 Mar 2015

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Anita Ganesan on behalf of the Authors (12 Mar 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (10 Apr 2015) by Federico Fierli

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (13 Apr 2015)

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (19 Apr 2015)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have thoroughly replied to the issues raised in the first review and have made the corresponding changes in the paper. Therefore, I recommend this paper for publication after a few minor issues have been addressed.

L8: state what the prior estimate is based on

L12: insert “annual mean” before “N2O emissions”

L25: missing hyphen “100-year”

L118-120: while it is wise to remove data with very strong local influence, the explanation for doing so should be improved. The authors state that the data were removed because these data were “more likely to be affected by local processes due to the more stagnant air”. The main problem with these data, however, is that due to deficiencies in the model, i.e., accuracy of atmospheric transport, spatial and temporal resolution of both the transport model and the fluxes, these data cannot be represented by the model. This, and the fact that the influence on observations at these times is very strong, would result in large errors in the model, which would lead to errors in the retrieved fluxes.

L122-123: there appears to be a verb and preposition missing in this sentence: “…the measurement uncertainty was described by the variability…”

L191: missing hyphen “30-day”

L193: replace “that air” by “from which air”

L196: this sentence could be made clearer, suggest: “…originate from the southern outer domain boundary”

L197: replace “formed by” by “comprised of”

L312-314: suggest changing this sentence to “A difference in natural emissions…” since the posterior estimated fluxes include the natural fluxes (it is the total flux that is estimated). The current formulation suggests that the posterior flux estimates exclude natural fluxes.

L322-323: perhaps the difference between the Bergamaschi et al. 2014 results and this study is due to the different observation dataset. In Bergamaschi et al., the new UK stations were not included.

L383: insert “ratio” after “signal-to-noise”

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RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (28 Apr 2015)

ED: Reconsider after minor revisions (Editor review) (01 May 2015) by Federico Fierli

AR by Anita Ganesan on behalf of the Authors (06 May 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (18 May 2015) by Federico Fierli

AR by Anita Ganesan on behalf of the Authors (19 May 2015) Manuscript

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Short summary

The UK is one of several countries to enact legislation to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. We present top-down emissions of methane and nitrous oxide for the UK and Ireland over 2012-2014. We inferred average UK emissions of 2.09Tg/yr CH4 and 0.101Tg/yr N2O and used sectoral distributions to determine whether these discrepancies can be attributed to specific source sectors. We found the agricultural sector likely to be overestimated in the bottom-up emissions inventories of both gases.