Quantifying CO₂ emissions of a city with the Copernicus Anthropogenic CO₂ Monitoring satellite mission

Gerrit Kuhlmann, Dominik Brunner, Grégoire Broquet, and Yasjka Meijer

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Final revised paper (published on 15 Dec 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 30 Jun 2020)
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Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 29 Jul 2020
- AC1: 'Authors' response', Gerrit Kuhlmann, 27 Sep 2020
RC2: 'Review of “Quantifying CO2 emissions of a city with the Copernicus Anthropogenic CO2 Monitoring satellite mission” by Kuhlmann et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 04 Sep 2020
- AC1: 'Authors' response', Gerrit Kuhlmann, 27 Sep 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Gerrit Kuhlmann on behalf of the Authors (27 Sep 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (09 Oct 2020) by Daniela Famulari

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (18 Oct 2020)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (20 Oct 2020) by Daniela Famulari

The authors of “Quantifying CO2 emissions of a city with the Copernicus Anthropogenic CO2 Monitoring satellite mission” have revised the manuscript according to the reviewers’ suggestions, thus improving the quality of the original. The revised manuscript is well written, and I recommend it for publication in AMT, after a few minor revisions suggested by R#1 in this second stage (listed below).

REV#1 feedback
I appreciate the authors’ efforts at clarification in the main text. The addition of the new Fig. 1 explaining the mass balance approach is very helpful in explaining the mass balance methodology to the reader.
As discussed in my previous review, the background/transport errors and diurnal sampling errors are significant sources of uncertainty in interpreting satellite data, and I see that the authors are in agreement as well. While I accept that the quantitative analyses can be incorporated in future analyses (albeit somewhat of a lost opportunity for this paper), I think the statements about the accuracy need to be qualified accordingly. Caveats need be added to the abstract, especially the part that starts with “The analytical inversion was able to estimate annual emissions with an accuracy of …” Given the fact that key uncertainties were neglected, a clear qualifying statement needs to be incorporated that refers to the fact that background/transport errors and diurnal sampling bias would result in additional uncertainties. Note that the diurnal sampling bias applies to both the analytical inversion and mass balance methods.
Secondly, Figure 1 needs to include the two-dimensional curve p(r). Otherwise it is not connected to equations 3 and 4.

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AR by Gerrit Kuhlmann on behalf of the Authors (20 Oct 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (23 Oct 2020) by Daniela Famulari

ED: Publish as is (26 Oct 2020) by Daniela Famulari

AR by Gerrit Kuhlmann on behalf of the Authors (27 Oct 2020) Manuscript

Short summary

The European CO2M mission is a proposed constellation of CO₂ imaging satellites expected to monitor CO₂ emissions of large cities. Using synthetic observations, we show that a constellation of two or more satellites should be able to quantify Berlin's annual emissions with 10–20 % accuracy, even when considering atmospheric transport model errors. We therefore expect that CO2M will make an important contribution to the monitoring and verification of CO₂ emissions from cities worldwide.