A high-resolution monitoring approach of urban CO2 fluxes. Part 1-bottom- up model development

Monitoring carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of urban areas is increasingly important to assess the progress towards the Paris Agreement goals for climate neutrality. Cities are currently voluntarily developing their local inventories, how-ever, the approaches used across different cities are not systematically assessed, present consistency issues, neglect the biogenic fluxes and have restricted spatial and temporal resolution. In order to assess the accuracy of the urban emis-sion inventories and provide information which is useful for planning local climate change mitigation actions, high res-olution modelling approaches combined or evaluated with atmospheric observations are needed. This study presents a new high-resolution bottom-up (BU) model which provides hourly maps of all major components contributing to the local urban surface CO2 flux (i.e. building emissions, traffic emissions, human respiration, soil respiration, plant respi-ration, plant photosynthetic uptake) and can therefore be used for direct comparison with in-situ atmospheric obser-vations and development of local scale atmospheric inversion methodologies. The model design aims to be simple and flexible using inputs that are available in most cities, facilitating transferability to different locations. The inputs are primarily based on open geospatial datasets, census information, road traffic monitoring and basic meteorological pa-rameters. The model is applied on the city centre of Basel, Switzerland, for the year 2018 and the results are compared to a local inventory. It is demonstrated that the model captures the highly dynamic spatiotemporal variability of the urban CO2 fluxes according to main environmental drivers, population activity dynamics and geospatial information proxies. The annual modelled emissions from buildings and traffic are estimated 14.8 % and 9 % lower than the respec-tive information derived by the local inventory. The differences are mainly attributed to the emissions from the indus-trial areas and the highways which are beyond the geographical coverage of the model.

Automated summary

This study develops a high-resolution bottom-up model that provides hourly maps of urban surface CO2 fluxes, including contributions from buildings, traffic, human respiration, soil respiration, plant respiration, and plant photosynthetic uptake. The model is designed to be simple and flexible, using commonly available data as input, making it transferable to different locations. Applied to Basel, Switzerland, the model captures the dynamic spatiotemporal variability of urban CO2 fluxes and estimates lower emissions from buildings and traffic compared to the local inventory.