Detection and Attribution of Regional greenhouse gas Emissions in the UK (DARE-UK)

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In order to mitigate the effects of climate change, governments, private companies and individual citizens are taking action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Our project will provide new information that can be used to better evaluate the change in emissions that result from these actions. We will help the UK government track the effectiveness of emissions reductions policies that have been implemented to meet the targets laid out in the Climate Change Act (2008), which mandates that GHG emissions are reduced by 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. The UK has played a major part in recent scientific and technological advances in emissions reporting and evaluation. Its GHG emission inventory, which is compiled based on data relating to human activities and rates of emission from each activity, is world-leading. Furthermore, the UK is one of only two countries that regularly submits a second estimate of emissions, those derived from atmospheric measurements, as part of its annual United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) submission. This second "top-down" estimate can be used to assess where uncertainties lie in the inventory and where further development is needed. However, limitations exist in our scientific knowledge and in our technical capabilities that prevent the UK, or any other country, from further improving its emissions reports through the incorporation of atmospheric data. Through the NERC Greenhouse Gas & Emissions Feedback programme, which ended in 2017, we demonstrated the ability to quantify the UK's net national GHG fluxes using atmospheric observations. However, we have not yet been able to separately estimate fossil fuel and biospheric carbon dioxide sources and sinks, or determine the major sectors driving changes in the UK's methane emissions. This proposal will develop new science to address these needs, and pave the way towards the next generation of GHG evaluation methodologies. Our work will span four key areas:1) Improving models of emissions from individual source and sink sectors to determine when and where GHG emissions to the atmosphere occur from both natural and anthropogenic systems.2) Utilising new surface and satellite atmospheric GHG observations, such as isotopic measurements of methane and carbon dioxide, and measurements of co-emitted or exchanged gases (oxygen, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and ethane) to provide information on emissions from different sectors.3) Utilising enhanced model-data fusion methods for making use of these new observations and for better quantifying uncertainties.4) Integrating data streams to determine the highest level of confidence in the UK's emissions estimate.To improve the transparency of national reports, scientists and policy makers have been strongly advocating for the combination of such methods in the reporting process. The UNFCCC, at its 2017 Conference of Parties, acknowledged the important role that emissions quantified through atmospheric observations could have in supporting inventory evaluation (SBSTA/2017/L.21). Through our close links to the inventory communities in the UK and around the world, the IPCC and to UK policy makers, we can ensure that our work will be used to update and improve the UK's GHG submission to the UNFCCC and will showcase methods of best-practice.