2024-L16 Mission to Understand Emissions: How can we assess air pollutant and greenhouse gas emissions from space today to shape the science and policies of tomorrow?

Overview

As we move toward stricter air quality guidelines and more ambitious climate targets, it is imperative that we understand emissions from key point and small area sources such as power stations, mines, landfills, and other industrial facilities, in order to best target our efforts.  We additionally need to monitor changes over time to evaluate the effectiveness of reduction measures.  To do this on a global scale we must utilise current and future satellite technologies and high-resolution atmospheric models. 

This project will utilise current satellite data and the cutting-edge model WRF-Chem to understand greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions from important point sources including power stations, mines, and landfills.  Evaluation of performance of satellite data will be conducted, and evidence for policy pathways explored.  Data from Sentinel 5P TROPOMI will be used in the first instance, with a focus on nitrogen dioxide and methane emission quantification.  This will be coupled with the WRF-Chem model.  Requirements for future data streams will be defined, with a view to satisfying the needs of policy decisionmakers of the future. 

A key element of this PhD will be understanding how environmental data products and analysis can be generated to best meet the needs of policy stakeholders.  The supervisory team have strong links with local, national and international policy stakeholders in both air pollution and greenhouse gas contexts. 

In addition to providing evidence for policy, this PhD will also develop advice on what future satellite observations are needed, and feed into building the case for future missions for air quality and greenhouse gas remote sensing, to ensure that future generations have a high quality long term record of point source emissions as policies and technologies evolve. 

Figure 1: An example of resolving industrial emissions by combining satellite data with models.  Here nitrogen dioxide emissions from a power station in Belchatow, Poland observed from TROPOMI are averaged (a) compared to wind-rotated and averaged (b) through application of ECMWF ERA5 data to illustrate how emissions can be resolved.  Reproduced from Potts et al., 2023.