A CO2–Δ14CO2 inversion setup for estimating European fossil CO2 emissions

Gómez-Ortiz, Carlos; Monteil, Guillaume; Basu, Sourish; Scholze, Marko

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-397-2025

Articles | Volume 25, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-397-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-397-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 25, issue 1

Research article

|

13 Jan 2025

Research article |

| 13 Jan 2025

A CO₂–Δ¹⁴CO₂ inversion setup for estimating European fossil CO₂ emissions

Carlos Gómez-Ortiz, Guillaume Monteil, Sourish Basu, and Marko Scholze

Data sets

Biosphere-atmosphere exchange fluxes for CO2 from the Vegetation Photosynthesis and Respiration Model VPRM for 2006-2022 Christoph Gerbig and Frank-Thomas Koch https://doi.org/10.18160/VX78-HVA1

European anthropogenic CO2emissions based on EDGARv4.3, BP statistics 2021 and CarbonMonitor for 2019-2020 Christoph Gerbig and Frank-Thomas Koch https://doi.org/10.18160/GFNT-5Y47

Input data: A CO2 - Δ14CO2 inversion setup for estimating European fossil CO2 emissions Carlos Gómez-Ortiz and Sourish Basu https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24307162

ODIAC Fossil Fuel CO2 Emissions Dataset Tomohiro Oda and Shamil Maksyutov https://doi.org/10.17595/20170411.001

European hourly NEE, GPP and total respiration for 2010- 2022 based on LPJ-GUESS (generated in 2023) Zhendong Wu https://doi.org/10.18160/P52C-1QJM

Model code and software

Lund University Modular Inversion Algorithm Guillaume Monteil et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8426217

Short summary

In this paper, we test new implementations of our inverse modeling tool to estimate the weekly and regional CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels in Europe. We use synthetic atmospheric observations of CO₂ and radiocarbon (¹⁴CO₂) to trace emissions to their sources, while separating the natural and fossil CO₂. Our tool accurately estimates fossil CO₂ emissions in densely monitored regions like western/central Europe. This approach aids in developing strategies for reducing CO₂ emissions.