Using Space‐Based Observations and Lagrangian Modeling to Evaluate Urban Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the Middle East

Improved observational understanding of urban CO2 emissions, a large and dynamic global source of fossil CO2, can provide essential insights for both carbon cycle science and mitigation decision making. Here we compare three distinct global CO2 emissions inventory representations of urban CO2 emissions for five Middle Eastern cities (Riyadh, Mecca, Tabuk, Jeddah, and Baghdad) and use independent satellite observations from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory‐2 (OCO‐2) satellite to evaluate the inventory representations of afternoon emissions. We use the column version of the Stochastic Time‐Inverted Lagrangian Transport (X‐STILT) model to account for atmospheric transport and link emissions to observations. We compare XCO2 simulations with observations to determine optimum inventory scaling factors. Applying these factors, we find that the average summed emissions for all five cities are 100 MtC year−1 (50–151, 90% CI), which is 2.0 (1.0, 3.0) times the average prior inventory magnitudes. The total adjustment of the emissions of these cities comes out to ~7% (0%, 14%) of total Middle Eastern emissions (~700 MtC year−1). We find our results to be insensitive to the prior spatial distributions in inventories of the cities' emissions, facilitating robust quantitative assessments of urban emission magnitudes without accurate high‐resolution gridded inventories.
Key Points We use satellite CO2 observations and three global emissions inventories to assess emissions representations of five Middle Eastern citiesEmissions estimates optimized with satellite CO2 observations are insensitive to prior inventory spatial distributionsEmissions estimates suggest afternoon Middle East urban inventory representations are too low