Background conditions for an urban greenhouse gas network  in the Washington, DC, and Baltimore metropolitan region

Karion, Anna; Lopez-Coto, Israel; Gourdji, Sharon M.; Mueller, Kimberly; Ghosh, Subhomoy; Callahan, William; Stock, Michael; DiGangi, Elizabeth; Prinzivalli, Steve; Whetstone, James

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-6257-2021

Articles | Volume 21, issue 8

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-6257-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-6257-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 8

Research article

|

26 Apr 2021

Research article |

| 26 Apr 2021

Background conditions for an urban greenhouse gas network in the Washington, DC, and Baltimore metropolitan region

Anna Karion, Israel Lopez-Coto, Sharon M. Gourdji, Kimberly Mueller, Subhomoy Ghosh, William Callahan, Michael Stock, Elizabeth DiGangi, Steve Prinzivalli, and James Whetstone

Data sets

Observations of CO2, CH4, and CO mole fractions from the NIST Northeast Corridor urban testbed A. Karion, J. R. Whetstone, W. Callahan, S. Prinzivalli, M. Stock, E. DiGangi, C. Fain, B. Biggs, C. Draper, S. Baldelli, and J. Considine https://doi.org/10.18434/M32126

Multi-laboratory compilation of atmospheric carbon dioxide data for the period 1957-2018, obspack_co2_1_GLOBALVIEWplus_v5.0_2019_08_12 Cooperative Global Atmospheric Data Integration Project https://doi.org/10.25925/20190812

Multi-laboratory compilation of atmospheric methane data for the period 1957-2018; obspack_ch4_1_GLOBALVIEWplus_v2.0_2020-04-24 Cooperative Global Atmospheric Data Integration Project https://doi.org/10.25925/20200424

Short summary

Estimating city emissions based on atmospheric observations requires that the portion of observed greenhouse gases that originated in the city be separated from the portion that originated outside the city, also known as the background concentration. Here, we investigate different methods to determine background concentrations for the Washington, DC, and Baltimore, MD, region and evaluate how well those methods work and the uncertainties they involve.