Mass-Conserving Inversion of NOx Emissions and Inferred Combustion
Technologies in Energy Rich Northern China Based on Multi-Year Daily
Remotely Sensed and Continuous Surface Measurements
Abstract
Nitrogen oxides (NOx) are markers of combustion
contributing to ozone, secondary aerosol, and acid rain, and are
required to run models focusing on atmospheric environmental protection.
This work presents a new model free inversion estimation framework using
daily TROPOMI NO2 columns and observed fluxes from the
continuous emissions monitoring systems (CEMS) to quantify emissions of
NOx at 0.05°×0.05°. The average emission is
0.72±0.11Tg/yr from 2019 through 2021 over Shanxi, a major energy
producing and consuming province in Northern China. The resulting
emissions demonstrates significant spatial and temporal differences with
bottom-up emissions databases, with 54% of the emissions concentrated
in 25% of the total area. Two major forcing factors are horizontal
advective transport (352.0±51.2km) and first order chemical loss
(13.1±1.1hours), consistent with a non-insignificant amount of
NOxadvected into the free troposphere. The third forcing
factor, the computed ratio of NOx/NO2,
on a pixel-by-pixel basis has a significant correlation with the
combustion temperature and energy efficiency of large energy consuming
sources. Specifically, thermal power plants, cement, and iron and steel
companies have high NOx/NO2 ratios,
while coking, industrial boilers, and aluminum show low ratios. Variance
maximization applied to the daily TROPOMI NO2 columns
identifies three modes dominate the variance and attributes them to this
work’s computed emissions, remotely sensedTROPOMI UVAI, and transport
based on TROPOMI CO. Using satellite observations for emission estimates
in connection with CEMS allows the rapid update of emissions, while also
providing scientific support for the identification and attribution of
anthropogenic sources.