Quantification of Fossil
Fuel CO<sub>2</sub> Emissions
on the Building/Street Scale for a Large U.S. City
- Publication date
- Publisher
Abstract
In order to advance the scientific understanding of carbon
exchange
with the land surface, build an effective carbon monitoring system,
and contribute to quantitatively based U.S. climate change policy
interests, fine spatial and temporal quantification of fossil fuel
CO<sub>2</sub> emissions, the primary greenhouse gas, is essential.
Called the “Hestia Project”, this research effort is
the first to use bottom-up methods to quantify all fossil fuel CO<sub>2</sub> emissions down to the scale of individual buildings, road
segments, and industrial/electricity production facilities on an hourly
basis for an entire urban landscape. Here, we describe the methods
used to quantify the on-site fossil fuel CO<sub>2</sub> emissions
across the city of Indianapolis, IN. This effort combines a series
of data sets and simulation tools such as a building energy simulation
model, traffic data, power production reporting, and local air pollution
reporting. The system is general enough to be applied to any large
U.S. city and holds tremendous potential as a key component of a carbon-monitoring
system in addition to enabling efficient greenhouse gas mitigation
and planning. We compare the natural gas component of our fossil fuel
CO<sub>2</sub> emissions estimate to consumption data provided by
the local gas utility. At the zip code level, we achieve a bias-adjusted
Pearson <i>r</i> correlation value of 0.92 (<i>p</i> < 0.001)