XCO2 in an emission hot-spot region: the COCCON Paris campaign 2015.

Abstract. Providing timely information on urban Greenhouse-Gas (GHG) emissions and their trends to stakeholders relies on reliable measurements of atmospheric concentrations and the understanding of how local emissions and atmospheric transport influence these observations. Portable Fourier Transform Infra-Red (FTIR) spectrometers were deployed at 5 stations in the Paris metropolitan area to provide column-averaged concentrations of CO₂ (XCO₂) during a field campaign in spring of 2015. Here, we describe and analyze the variations of XCO₂ observed at different sites and how they changed over time. We find that observations upwind and downwind of the city centre differ significantly in their XCO₂ concentrations, while the overall variability of the daily cycle is similar, i.e., increasing during night-time with a strong decrease (typically 2–3ppm) during the afternoon. An atmospheric transport model framework (CHIMERE-CAMS) was used to simulate XCO₂ and predict the same behaviour seen in the observations, which supports key findings, e.g. that even in a densely populated region like Paris (over 12 Million people), biospheric uptake of CO₂ can be of major influence on daily XCO₂ variations. Despite a general offset between modelled and observed XCO₂, the model correctly predicts the impact of the meteorological parameters (e.g. wind direction and speed) on the concentration gradients between different stations. Looking at the local gradients of XCO₂ for upwind and downwind station pairs, which is less sensitive to changes in XCO₂ regional background conditions, we find the model-data agreement significantly better. Our modelling framework indicates that the local XCO₂ gradient between the stations is dominated by the fossil fuel CO₂ signal of the Paris metropolitan area. This highlights the usefulness of XCO₂ observations to help optimise future urban GHG emission estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]