LA Serving As Pilot City For NASA’s New Megacities Carbon Project

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
By the end of the year, NASA plans to have a network of 15 monitoring stations around the Los Angeles basin that will use commercially available high-precision greenhouse gas analyzers to continually sample the local air as part of its Megacities Carbon Project, the US-based agency revealed on Tuesday.
The LA network will encompass the portions of the South Coast Air Basin that produce the most intense greenhouse gas emissions in California. It will utilize in-situ sensors located throughout the region to provide continuous, highly accurate measurements of greenhouse gas mixing ratios of CO2, CH4, and CO, the organization added.
Riley Duren of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory serves as the principal investigator of the LA component of the Megacities Carbon Project, and he hopes to work alongside a group of international partners to deploy a global urban carbon monitoring system that will eventually make it possible for local legislators to fully account for all of the sources and storage sites (sinks) of carbon, as well as to monitor how they change over time.
Los Angeles joins Paris as the two pilot cities taking part in the initiative, though NASA said that efforts are currently underway to expand the project to other locations throughout the world. The LA pilot project is being funded by NASA, NOAA, the Keck Institute for Space Studies and the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Project partners include the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and others.
“LA is a giant laboratory for climate studies and measurement tests,” Duren said in a statement Tuesday. “The LA megacity sprawls across five counties, 150 municipalities, many freeways, landfills, oil wells, gas pipelines, America’s largest seaport, mountains, and even dairies, all within an area measuring about 80 miles [130 kilometers] on a side.”
According to NASA, urbanization has concentrated over half of the planet’s population, as well as at least 70 percent of all CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and a significant amount of methane emissions, into a miniscule fraction of Earth’s land surface. The 40 largest cities in the world combined would rank as the third-largest emitter of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide (exceeding the total national emissions of Japan), and experts expect the trend to continue.
As such, the organization said there is “an urgent need” to get the massive growth of fossil-fuel related carbon emissions in cities under control, as well as to establish new baseline measurements that will make it easier to study these emission trends. While the majority of countries and some US states produce annual greenhouse gas emission inventories based on data such as energy statistics, this information is typically not available at the city level.
“Cities around the world are expected to undergo rapid change in the next 20 years,” NASA explained. “Many, particularly in the developing world, are undergoing unconstrained growth, with emissions growing by more than 10 percent a year. The United Nations predicts that Earth’s urban population will double by 2050, dramatically increasing the number and size of megacities, and their carbon footprints.”
“The Megacities project combines direct surface measurements of urban greenhouse gases from instruments located in air sampling stations atop radio towers and buildings, with broader, denser remote-sensing observations from aircraft, mountaintops and satellites,” the agency added. “Other instruments track winds and vertical motion of the atmosphere — both of which are key to interpreting the greenhouse gas measurements.”
NASA recently launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), a satellite which is able to detect the enhanced CO2 levels above the world’s largest cities, and has started using it to monitor LA as part of the Megacities initiative. The researchers are compiling high-resolution emissions data with data from local governments that they will compare to Megacities project measurement data in order to improve emission estimates.
“The result will be independent, accurate assessments of carbon emissions and a better understanding of the factors that affect them. Sustained monitoring over several years will enable assessment of trends,” said NASA. “Ultimately, the concept of a global carbon-monitoring system focused on the largest carbon emitters hinges on the ability to extend pilot efforts like those in LA and Paris to other megacities, smaller cities and large power plants.”
“This involves establishing surface measurement networks in representative areas while taking advantage of the broader coverage of satellite observations,” the agency added. “The atmospheric measurements will be linked with other information used by decision-makers, such as traffic data. Transparent sharing of satellite observations could prove vital in cities in the developing world, where ground data on emissions are not available.”
Duren explained that the concept is to measure and track emissions for the individual cities, to better understand how and why those levels are changing, and to ultimately link observed changes in the atmosphere with specific human activities. To do this in LA, they plan to use 15 monitoring stations (including a pair of so-called “super sites” at Caltech in Pasadena and atop nearby Mt. Wilson) to analyze gas emissions and collect other measurements.