Observing System Choice Can Minimize Interference of the Biosphere in Studies of Urban CO2 Emissions

Cities around the world have introduced initiatives to reduce CO2 emissions. Atmospheric observations can provide evaluation and assessment of these initiatives by quantifying emissions, considering local sources and sinks. The relative importance of the urban biosphere, which can act as both a source (respiration) and sink (photosynthesis) of CO2, has previously been suggested to strongly impact urban CO2 measurements, confounding the ability to use observations to study fossil emissions. However, if using an observing framework that measures a local urban background and the direct urban core outflow, for example, along a downwind airborne transect, the biosphere's role may be minimized. Here, we combine real, airborne observations of CO2 downwind of select cities in the Northeast US with high-resolution, back-trajectory modeling and spatially and temporally resolved surface biosphere and fossil fuel fluxes to characterize the relative biosphere importance to urban CO2 profiles. We show the biosphere influence using this urban observing system to be small, averaging only 15% of the local CO2 enhancement annually, <10% outside of summer, and with a maximum influence of 29% in summer when the biosphere drawdown is most pronounced. Furthermore, when considering two biosphere models that differ by >80%, the impact on observed urban CO2 signals is reduced to only 12% on average. Urban observing frameworks that utilize this local background approach-including those via aircraft or satellite observations-can minimize the biosphere's influence and thus help facilitate robust assessments of urban fossil fuel CO2 emissions.

Automated summary

Cities around the world have introduced initiatives to reduce CO2 emissions. Atmospheric observations can provide evaluation and assessment of these initiatives by quantifying emissions, considering local sources and sinks. The relative importance of the urban biosphere, which can act as both a source (respiration) and sink (photosynthesis) of CO2, has previously been suggested to strongly impact urban CO2 measurements, confounding the ability to use observations to study fossil emissions.