Detection of Anthropogenic CO2 Emission Signatures with TanSat CO2 and with Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P) NO2 Measurements: First Results

China's first carbon dioxide (CO2) measurement satellite mission, TanSat, was launched in December 2016. This paper introduces the first attempt to detect anthropogenic CO2 emission signatures using CO2 observations from TanSat and NO2 measurements from the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) onboard the Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P) satellite. We focus our analysis on two selected cases in Tangshan, China and Tokyo, Japan. We found that the TanSat XCO2 measurements have the capability to capture the anthropogenic variations in the plume and have spatial patterns similar to that of the TROPOMI NO2 observations. The linear fit between TanSat XCO2 and TROPOMI NO2 indicates the CO2-to-NO2 ratio of 0.8 x 10(-16) ppm (molec cm(-2))(-1) in Tangshan and 2.3 x 10(-16) ppm (molec cm(-2))(-1) in Tokyo. Our results align with the CO2-to-NOx emission ratios obtained from the EDGAR v6 emission inventory.

Automated summary

This paper introduces the first attempt to detect anthropogenic CO2 emission signatures using data from China's TanSat satellite and the TROPOMI instrument on board the Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite. The results show that TanSat's CO2 measurements have the capability to capture anthropogenic variations and have similar spatial patterns with TROPOMI's NO2 observations.