Detectability of CO<sub>2</sub> emission plumes of cities and power plants with the Copernicus Anthropogenic CO<sub>2</sub> Monitoring (CO2M) mission

Kuhlmann, Gerrit; Broquet, Grégoire; Marshall, Julia; Clément, Valentin; Löscher, Armin; Meijer, Yasjka; Brunner, Dominik

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-6695-2019

Articles | Volume 12, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-6695-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-12-6695-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 12

Research article

|

19 Dec 2019

Research article |

| 19 Dec 2019

Detectability of CO₂ emission plumes of cities and power plants with the Copernicus Anthropogenic CO₂ Monitoring (CO2M) mission

Gerrit Kuhlmann, Grégoire Broquet, Julia Marshall, Valentin Clément, Armin Löscher, Yasjka Meijer, and Dominik Brunner

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Final revised paper (published on 19 Dec 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 17 Jun 2019)

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Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Review of amt-2019-180', Anonymous Referee #1, 19 Jul 2019
- AC1: 'Response to reviewer #1', Gerrit Kuhlmann, 16 Sep 2019
RC2: 'Review comment', Anonymous Referee #2, 16 Aug 2019
- AC2: 'Response to reviewer #2', Gerrit Kuhlmann, 16 Sep 2019

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Gerrit Kuhlmann on behalf of the Authors (16 Sep 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (02 Oct 2019) by Ilse Aben

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (12 Nov 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

To the authors of the manuscript,

Thank you for the responses to the comments. I (Referee #2) was not really questioning the results from OSSEs (because it is OSSE). However, I had a hard time to assess the scientific significance of this study and thus I was asking the questions and requesting more information. I think the revised manuscript carries fair statements regarding limitations that have been pointed out. Here, I provide some responses and suggestions to mainly further examine the scientific significance of this study. I also ask for some clarifications.

Sincerely,
Referee #2

General comments 3: This study is addressing a component (plume detection) of the CO2M based CO2 monitoring system (= measurement technique). It is important to show this study's relevance and significance in the large picture of CO2 monitoring, especially because the authors have highlighted their relevance to CO2 monitoring. Thus, I still think the authors need to provide how CO2M will be contributing to CO2 monitoring to show this study's significance. As CO2M has been a big focus in this study, introducing the satellite with a few sentences by citing other studies does not seem to be sufficient. This is an OSSE study, but we need to understand which instrument/measurement technique the authors studied.

General comments 5: I am not here questioning the feasibility of detection, but the step you attribute a plume to a certain source. I thought emission attribution is an important component of the CO2 monitoring (that's why I keep asking a question like above...). Yes, what the authors mention is fair and probably theoretically possible. However, I don't think it is practical and the authors haven't show the ability to maintaining policy-relevant quality. The authors should check how the Google Earth image look like over China... the long term average can be used, but detection is not the last step... anyway.

P2, P10: Again, even before having a monitoring system, many of cities have no idea of their emissions as they don't have emission inventories.

P2, CO2 observation system -> Emission Verification Support System (?)

P2, L28: detecting? If you want to stick to detection, Nassar et al. (2017), who sticked to a few cases that worked out (later, the author acknowledged one of the demonstrated power plants was not correct) and Reuter et al. (2019), who used NO2 not just CO2 alone. This sentence is misleading.

P4, L4: This is not just for weak anthropogenic plumes. For example, Nassar et al. (2017) simply assumed the subset of the OCO2 stripe as a background w/o any investigation. How do you distinguish large and weak CO2 emitters? Is 10Mt CO2/yr the threshold?

P5, L8: If it's only available in German, I would still request a few sentences summarizing this inventory for many non-German speaking audience including myself. W/o knowing this inventory, we don't get a good sense of what the authors discuss at L5-L9.

P10, L28: simplified from?

P32, L19: point sources -> coal-fired power plants? Coal-fired power plants are not the only kind for CO2 point sources.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (14 Nov 2019)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (15 Nov 2019) by Ilse Aben

AR by Gerrit Kuhlmann on behalf of the Authors (26 Nov 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (27 Nov 2019) by Ilse Aben

Short summary

The Copernicus Anthropogenic CO₂ Monitoring (CO2M) mission is a proposed constellation of imaging satellites with a CO₂ instrument as main payload and optionally instruments for NO₂, CO and aerosols. This study demonstrates the huge benefit of an NO₂ instrument for detecting city plumes and weak point sources. Its main advantages are the higher signal-to-noise ratio and the lower sensitivity to clouds that significantly increases the number of observations available for quantifying CO₂ emission.

Detectability of CO2 emission plumes of cities and power plants with the Copernicus Anthropogenic CO2 Monitoring (CO2M) mission

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Detectability of CO₂ emission plumes of cities and power plants with the Copernicus Anthropogenic CO₂ Monitoring (CO2M) mission