Global to local impacts on atmospheric CO2 from the COVID-19 lockdown, biosphere and weather variabilities

The worldwide lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in year 2020 led to an economic slowdown and a large reduction in fossil fuel CO _2 emissions (Le Quéré 2020 Nat. Clim. Change 10 647–53, Liu 2020 Nat. Commun. 11 ); however, it is unclear how much it would slow the increasing trend of atmospheric CO _2 concentration, the main driver of climate change, and whether this impact can be observed considering the large biosphere and weather variabilities. We used a state-of-the-art atmospheric transport model to simulate CO _2 , and the model was driven by a new daily fossil fuel emissions dataset and hourly biospheric fluxes from a carbon cycle model forced with observed climate variability. Our results show a 0.21 ppm decrease in the atmospheric column CO _2 anomaly in the Northern Hemisphere latitude band 0–45° N in March 2020, and an average of 0.14 ppm for the period of February–April 2020, which is the largest decrease in the last 10 years. A similar decrease was observed by the carbon observing satellite GOSAT (Yokota et al 2009 Sola 5 160–3). Using model sensitivity experiments, we further found that the COVID and weather variability are the major contributors to this CO _2 drawdown, and the biosphere showed a small positive anomaly. Measurements at marine boundary layer stations, such as Hawaii, exhibit 1–2 ppm anomalies, mostly due to weather and the biosphere. At the city scale, the on-road CO _2 enhancement measured in Beijing shows a reduction by 20–30 ppm, which is consistent with the drastically reduced traffic during the COVID lockdown. A stepwise drop of 20 ppm during the city-wide lockdown was observed in the city of Chengdu. The ability of our current carbon monitoring systems in detecting the small and short-lasting COVID signals at different policy relevant scales (country and city) against the background of fossil fuel CO _2 accumulated over the last two centuries is encouraging. The COVID-19 pandemic is an unintended experiment. Its impact suggests that to keep atmospheric CO _2 at a climate-safe level will require sustained effort of similar magnitude and improved accuracy, as well as expanded spatiotemporal coverage of our monitoring systems.