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Project

Detection and Attribution of Regional greenhouse gas Emissions in the UK

London skyline, by Robert Bye, Unsplash

Completed project

Project start: September 2019  |  Project end: August 2023
Funder: NERC
Principal Investigator: Dr Yuri Artioli
Other participants from PML: Dr Gennadi Lessin, Dr Vassilis Kitidis, Ian Brown
Website: https://dareuk.blogs.bristol.ac.uk

DARE-UK is developing systems to estimate greenhouse gas emissions to improve the accuracy of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions inventory reports.

 

PML is contributing to the DARE-UK project by modelling the fluxes of the three main greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane from the UK coastal and shelf waters. The will improve atmospheric models and enable fluxes of these gases from estuaries to be measured.

This will contribute to the main objectives of the DARE-UK project:

  • Attribute the contribution of individual sectors to the variability of measured greenhouse gas concentrations over the UK and Ireland.
  • Reconcile any mismatch between atmospheric greenhouse gas measurements with those from UK emissions or biogenic sources.
  • Determine the confidence in the reported levels of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.

 

To achieve these objectives, scientific and technical advances will be made by:

  • Developing more comprehensive bottom-up flux estimates of the three GHGs from anthropogenic, terrestrial biogenic and aquatic systems with improved uncertainty quantification.
  • Extending top-down methods to enable the use of new co-emitted tracers to separate fluxes from different source sectors.
  • Making use of new high-resolution remotely-sensed data for areas of the UK not well-captured by the current surface network.
  • Improving simulations of atmospheric greenhouse gase dispersion, which are vital for linking estimated fluxes with atmospheric observations and developing new methods for evaluating model performance and uncertainty.

 

Impact

This research provides the scientific evidence-base and recommendations to the UK government to improve the UK’s reporting of greenhouse gases to the UNFCCC, and to contribute to the Transparency Framework and the Global Stocktake.