Marc Guevara, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Earth Sciences department, marc.guevara@bsc.es

Brian McDonald, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Chemical Sciences Laboratory, brian.mcdonald@noaa.gov

Key Publication:

Guevara, M., Petetin, H., Jorba, O., Denier van der Gon, H., Kuenen, J., Super, I., Granier, C., Doumbia, T., Ciais, P., Liu, Z., Lamboll, R. D., Schindlbacher, S., Matthews, B., and Pérez García-Pando, C.: Towards near-real-time air pollutant and greenhouse gas emissions: lessons learned from multiple estimates during the COVID-19 pandemic, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 23, 8081–8101, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-23-8081-2023, 2023.

Overview  

To control the spread of the COVID-19 disease, governments are implementing emergency measures going from light social distancing to strict lockdowns, depending on the country. As a consequence, many industries, businesses and transportation networks are being impacted, which results in an unprecedented drop of anthropogenic emissions, including of both criteria air pollutants and greenhouse gases.  The use of ground-based and satellite observational datasets is being widely used to monitor and evaluate the impact ofthe COVID-19 outbreak on pollution levels and climate. However, a complete understanding requires also the quantification of emission changes from primary pollutants, which can later be used for modelling purposes. This quantification comes with a series of challenges, including: the heterogeneous impact of the COVID-19 restrictions across countries and pollutant sectors, the need to use near-real-time activity data that captures the precise timing of changes in emissions in different regions and sectors.

Key points:

• The focus of the WG will be global and include both criteria and GHG pollutants
• The activities should cover not only the 1st lockdown period, but also reopening phases, subsequent lockdowns, as well as the transition period towards a post-pandemic situation.
• The WG will provide guidance for the compilation of COVID-19 emission inventories. The guidance should target not only emission modellers but also data providers and inverse modellers (e.g. coordination with the AMIGO initiative)
• The WG will use the best available science to compile and provide a rigorous mosaic of regional and global COVID-19 emissions for the modelling community.
• We anticipate the WG to be a multi-year effort given the size and duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Priorities     Priorities of the COVID19-WG are divided according to time frames:

·      short-term:

o   To identify key regional and global experts currently working on the quantification of COVID-19 emissions and create a network where information, data, knowledge and experience can be exchanged.

o   To identify, review and facilitate access through the ECCAD system to the latest available COVID-19 emission inventories.

·      mid-term:

o   To identify and assess the methods and proxies used to compute the emission changes for the different sectors in developed and developing countries

o   To provide sector-by-sector guidance on the compilation of COVID-19 emissions and its adaptation for air quality modelling

o   To perform intercomparison exercises between COVID-19 emission inventories (global versus regional and regional versus regional)

·      long-term:

o   To develop and evaluate a mosaic of global and regional COVID-19 emission adjustment factors to quantify emission changes and perform modelling studies

 Marc Guevara, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Earth Sciences department, marc.guevara@bsc.es

Brian McDonald, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Chemical Sciences Laboratory, brian.mcdonald@noaa.gov   

Working Group Members

COVID Related Datasets - Please let Co-Chairs know if there are other datasets to add to this list.

Working Group Co-Chairs:  Marc Guevara, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Earth Sciences department, marc.guevara@bsc.es

Brian McDonald, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Chemical Sciences Laboratory, brian.mcdonald@noaa.gov

Introduction/Welcome (M. Guevara, B. McDonald)

Europe (M. Guevara)

·      Introduction (M. Guevara)

·      Impact of lockdowns and winter temperatures on natural gas consumption in Europe (P. Ciais)

·      Role of emissions and meteorology for air quality improvements during lockdowns in Central Europe (V. Matthias)

·      A proxy-based extrapolation of 2020 business-as-usual and COVID-19 and emissions (I. Super)

·      A new CAMS emission dataset to quantify impact of lockdown on primary European emissions (M. Guevara)

North America (B. McDonald) 

·      Introduction (B. McDonald)

·      Developing near real-time COVID-19 emissions over the US (B. McDonald) 

·      Rapid refresh of emissions at the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory (P. Campbell)

·      Ongoing US EPA efforts to reflect COVID-19 induced impacts on the 2020 NEI modeling platform (K. Seltzer) 

·      Vulcan-NRT: latest updates to generating near-real-time FFCO2 emissions estimates in the Volcan Project (K. Gurney) 

Latin America (M. Osses) 

·      Introduction (M. Osses)

·      Air quality and emissions changes during COVID-19 lockdown in Argentina (E. Puliafito)

·      Photochemical sensitivity to emissions and local meteorology of three South American megacities during the COVID-19 lockdown: Bogotá, Santiago, and São Paulo (R. Sequel) 

Africa (M. Naidoo) 

Asia and Australia (B. Zheng)

Global (C. Granier)

·      Introduction (C. Granier) 

·      Covid-19 lockdowns impacts on the global CO2 budget (P. Ciais)

·      Use of unconventional activity data to quantify the impact of Covid lockdowns on traffic emissions (T. Oda)

·      The CovidMIP Model Intercomparison Project (R. Lamboll)

·      Covid-19 adjustment factors for global emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases (T. Doumbia / B. Gaubert)

·      Implementation of the impact of Covid-19 lockdowns in the CEDS emissions dataset (S. Smith) 

Wrap-up 

Q&A