Speaker
Description
To manage current climate change, global greenhouse gas emissions will have to be reduced considerably, which is coordinated under multiple international treaties. An accurate assessment of greenhouse gas emissions therefore forms the basis for any predictions and mitigation strategies regarding climate change. Currently, this is done by most countries via bottom-up calculations that are reported to the UNFCCC. These however contain very large uncertainties and are often in disagreement with actual atmospheric concentration measurements. A promising approach is to complement these bottom-up calculations with a top-down approach that is based on atmospheric inversions and integrates atmospheric observations, leading to considerably lowered uncertainties which are additionally spatially and temporally resolved. For this, the GHG fluxes of different landcover types are estimated and upscaled (based on e.g. ICOS fluxtowers), combined with an atmospheric transport model (such as WRF-GHG) and then checked by atmospheric concentration measurements, resulting in posterior flux estimates. To establish such a framework for Belgium, the VERBE project (GHG VERification for BElgium) was formed as a partnership between BIRA-IASB, the Universiteit Antwerpen and the Université Liége with three main aims: 1) Establish independent atmospheric GHG concentration measurements via a new ICOS tall tower and field campaigns; 2) improve prior GHG flux estimation by adapting current methodologies specifically to the Belgian domain and by integrating new remote sensing products; and 3) develop an independent framework for atmospheric inversions for the Belgian domain that integrates the atmospheric measurements and prior fluxes to obtain posterior fluxes.
