Case Study: ODIAC

EfSI offers a solution to existing gaps in global emission inventories

Urban areas account for more than 70% of Global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, and cities are increasingly exercising their collective authority to act on global sustainability issues like climate change. Global networks of city and town governments, such as the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, have committed to increasing local action on climate change. Yet, despite the urgent need for this action, city-level leaders are up against a major information hurdle - access to actionable data on pollution levels from fossil fuels. Emission inventories have rarely been available at the city-level, or across time. In the absence of this data, city governments cannot measure their progress on emissions reductions, and, therefore, effectively plan towards emissions management, or even assess how well in-place urban policies are working.

Scientists from the Earth from Space Institute (EfSI) are able to respond to this gap with the Open-sourced Data Inventory for Anthropogenic CO₂ (ODIAC), a global spatially-explicit emissions inventory available at high resolution (1km x 1km), a scale that is actionable for cities.

The ODIAC emission product was originally developed at the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) in Japan, under the Greenhouse gas Observing SATellite (GOSAT) project, the first satellite mission dedicated to GHG observations. ODIAC is modeled by fusing national CO2 emissions inventories that have been downscaled by satellite-observed nighttime lights with power plant emission intensities measured at their specific locations. By integrating data sets from point- and non-point sources, ODIAC makes it possible to implement GHG budget analyses using the inventory-based emission information and the realistic emission spatial patterns. Such analyses allow stakeholders to assess progress on GHG management towards global accords, such as the Paris Agreement, using atmospheric observations from Japan's GOSAT, NASA's OCO-2, OCO-3 missions, and future satellite missions. In collaboration with NIES and NASA, EfSI scientists are developing an up-to-date global emission product is being distributed, free of charge. ODIAC products are available from the Global Environmental Database, hosted by NIES (https://db.cger.nies.go.jp/dataset/ODIAC/). 

EfSI scientists and their collaborators have also been working to improve the accuracy of the ODIAC product in higher (~30 meter) spatial resolutions through advanced data collection. To achieve this goal, ODIAC will incorporate a wide variety of Earth observation data, such as NASA's Black Marble product suite. Recent results seem very promising to improve the accuracy of urban CO2 simulations. In response to the global challenge of combating Climate change, ODIAC aims to serve as an interface between scientific GHG emission analysis and policy making with the goal to help provide solutions and turn cities into low-carbon smart cities of the future. You can learn more about the ODIAC project by accessing our recent e-book publication, "Mapping Cities’ Carbon Emissions Through Advanced Data Collection".

U.S. cities in the dark - ODIAC based on Black Marble's nightlight data

References & Resources

Oda, T.: Mapping Cities’ Carbon Emissions Through Advanced Data Collection, e-book, Scientia, https://doi.org/10.33548/SCIENTIA582, 2020

Oda, T., Maksyutov, S., and Andres, R. J.: The Open-source Data Inventory for Anthropogenic CO₂, version 2016 (ODIAC2016): a global monthly fossil fuel CO₂gridded emissions data product for tracer transport simulations and surface flux inversions, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 10, 87-107, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-87-2018, 2018

Román, M., Wang, Z., Sun, Q., Kalb, V., Miller, S.D., Molthan, A.L., Schultz, L.A., Bell, J.R., Stokes, E., Seto, K., Pandey, B., Hall, D.K., Oda, T., Wolfe, R.E., Lin, G., Golpayegani, N., Devadiga, S., Davidson, C.C., Sarkar, S., Praderas, C., Schmaltz, J., Boller, R.A., Stevens, J., Ramos Gonzalez, O.M., Padilla, E., Alonso, J., Detres, Y., Armstrong, R., Miranda, I., Conte, Y., Marrero, N., MacManus, K., Esch, T., Masuoka, E.J. “NASA’s Black Marble Standard Product Suite”, Remote Sensing of Environment, 210, 113-143, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2018.03.017, 2018