Fossil fuel CO2 emission signatures over India captured by OCO-2
satellite measurements
Abstract
Monitoring greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is crucial for developing
effective mitigation strategies. Recent advances in satellite
remote-sensing measurements allow us to ack greenhouse gas emissions
globally. This study assesses CO2 emissions from various point/local
sources, particularly power plants in India, using eight years of
concurrent high-resolution OCO-2 satellite measurements. Gaussian plume
(GP) model was used to evaluate the power plant emissions reported in
the Carbon Brief (CB) database. In total (39 cases), 42 different power
plant CO2 emissions were assessed, with 26 of them being assessed more
than once. The estimated power plant CO2 emissions were within ± 25% of
the emissions reported in the CB database in 11 out of 39 cases and
within ± 50% in 18 cases. To evaluate the EDGAR and ODIAC CO2 emission
inventories in terms of missing or highly underestimated sources, we
estimated the cross-sectional (CS) CO2 emission flux for 47 cases. We
identified the possible omission of power plant emissions in three cases
for both inventories. Furthermore, we also showed 21 cases in which CO2
emissions from unknown (non-power plant) sources were highly
underestimated in the EDGAR and ODIAC CO2 emission inventories. Due to
the simplicity of the employed approaches and their lower computational
requirements compared to other methods, they can be applied to large
datasets over extended time periods. This enables the acquisition of
initial emission estimates for various sources, including those that are
unknown or underestimated.