Researchers have struggled to quantify in real time how much carbon dioxide humans spout. Lockdowns presented a unique opportunity to get a clearer picture.
, Pickers and her colleagues then used the algorithm to predict what those emissions levels would have beentwo pandemic lockdowns, one between March and July 2020 and another between November 2020 and January 2021. Then they compared these predictions to the actual APO data they collected during the slowdowns. The difference estimated how far emissions dropped during the pandemic, giving a result comparable to ones found with other estimation techniques, like those based on known energy usage.
APO is not meant to replace other ways of calculating emissions, but to complement them—each technique has its pros and cons. Satellites are expensive, but they can zoom in on any spot on Earth. Bottom-up inventories can be slow, but they do an excellent job of accounting for emissions, and can differentiate those derived from different fuels, unlike APO.
“Ground-based measurements always have this particular challenge when compared to satellites,” says Northern Arizona University climate scientist Kevin Gurney, whose own platform, Vulcan, uses census, traffic, and other data to. “But there's no reason that you couldn't increase the number of ground-based measurements and locate them strategically and densely to carefully isolate countries or regions.
This kind of work is important, says Gurney, because we have to know where the carbon is coming from before we can get rid of it. “Accuracy just gives you a better sense of prioritization of what you're going to tackle,” says Gurney. Once mitigation is in place—say, a city starts a program to reduce energy waste by insulating buildings—monitoring emissions in real time will help officials determine if it’s working or not, and adapt accordingly.
There is no one technique to rule them all—a network of APO observatories could join satellite monitoring and good old inventories to build a better picture of how the carbon soup in the sky is changing. “We already actually have quite a good [observatory] network across some parts of the world,” says Pickers. “Having information quickly, at the relevant scales, for how the change in emissions is occurring is really important if we want to be successful at reducing our emissions.
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