Can a COVID-19 related regional-scale CO2 emission reduction be detected
from space using satellite XCO2 retrievals?: A case study for East China
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in reduced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions
in 2020 in large parts of the world. We have analysed an ensemble of
satellite retrievals of column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of CO2,
i.e. XCO2, to find out if the COVID-19 related regional-scale reduction
of anthropogenic CO2 emissions can be detected from space. We focus on
East China and analysed a set of latest version XCO2 data products from
the satellites Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) and Greenhouse
gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT). We use a data-driven approach, which
is based on the computation of XCO2 anomalies using a method called DAM.
Via DAM, trends and seasonal variations are largely filtered out and
resulting positive values of the XCO2 anomalies correlate with the
location of major CO2 source regions such as East China after
spatio-temporal averaging. We analysed satellite data between January
2015 to May 2020 and compared monthly XCO2 anomalies in the time period
January to May 2020 with corresponding monthly XCO2 anomalies from
previous years. In order to link the satellite-derived XCO2 anomalies to
East China fossil fuel (FF) emissions, we used target region XCO2 and
corresponding FF emissions from a model.