Carbon Monoxide: one of the most important air pollutants

Numerous studies have reported in situ monitoring and source analysis in the Tibetan Plateau (TP), a region crucial for climate systems. However, a gap remains in understanding the comprehensive distribution of atmospheric pollutants in the TP and their transboundary pollution transport. Here, we analyzed the high-resolution satellite TROPOMI observations from 2018 to 2023 in Tibet and its surrounding areas. Our result reveals that, contrary to the results from in situ surface CO monitoring, Tibet exhibits a distinct seasonality in atmospheric carbon monoxide total column average mixing ratio (XCO), with higher levels in summer and lower levels in winter. This distinctive seasonal pattern may be related to the TP’s ‘air pump’ effect and the Asia summer monsoon. Before 2022, the annual growth rate of XCO in Tibet was 1.63 %·year^‑1

This paper presents the automated plume detection and emission estimation algorithm (APE), developed to detect CO plumes from isolated biomass burning events and to quantify the corresponding CO emission rate. APE uses the CO product of the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) on board the Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P) satellite, launched in 2017, and collocated active fire data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), the latter flying 3 min ahead of S5P. After identifying appropriate fire events using VIIRS data, an automated plume detection algorithm based on traditional image processing algorithms selects plumes for further data interpretation. The approach is based on thresholds optimized for data over the United States in September 2020. Subsequently, the CO emission rate is estimated using the cross-sectional flux method, which requires horizontal wind fields at the plume height. Three different plume heights were considered, and the ECMWF Reanalysis v5 (ERA5) data were used to compute emissions. A varying plume height in the downwind direction based on three-dimensional Lagrangian simulation was considered appropriate. APE is verified for observations over Australia and Siberia. For all fire sources identified by VIIRS, only 16 % of the data corresponded to clear-sky TROPOMI CO data with plume signature. Furthermore, the quality filters of APE resulted in emission estimations for 26 % of the TROPOMI CO data with plume signatures. Visual filtering of the APE’s output showed a true-positive confidence level of 97.7 %. Finally, we provide an estimate of the emission uncertainties. The greatest contribution of error comes from the uncertainty in Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS) injection height that leads to emission errors <100 %, followed by systematic errors in the ERA5 wind data. The assumption of constant emission during plume formation and spatial under-sampling of CO column concentration by TROPOMI yields an error of <20 %. The randomized errors from the ensemble ERA5 wind data are found to be less than 20 % for 97 % of the cases.

Despite the consensus on the overall downward trend in Amazon forest loss in the previous decade, estimates of yearly carbon emissions from deforestation still vary widely. Estimated carbon emissions are currently often based on data from local logging activity reports, changes in remotely sensed biomass, and remote detection of fire hotspots and burned area. Here, we use 16 years of satellite-derived carbon monoxide (CO) columns to constrain fire CO emissions from the Amazon Basin between 2003 and 2018. Through data assimilation, we produce 3 d average maps of fire CO emissions over the Amazon, which we verified to be consistent with a long-term monitoring programme of aircraft CO profiles over five sites in the Amazon. Our new product independently confirms a long-term decrease of 54 % in deforestation-related CO emissions over the study period. Interannual variability is large, with known anomalously dry years showing a more than 4-fold increase in basin-wide fire emissions relative to wet years. At the level of individual Brazilian states, we find that both soil moisture anomalies and human ignitions determine fire activity, suggesting that future carbon release from fires depends on drought intensity as much as on continued forest protection. Our study shows that the atmospheric composition perspective on deforestation is a valuable additional monitoring instrument that complements existing bottom-up and remote sensing methods for land-use change. Extension of such a perspective to an operational framework is timely considering the observed increased fire intensity in the Amazon Basin between 2019 and 2021.