Neural Network Based Estimation of Regional Scale Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions Using OCO-2 Dataset Over East and West Asia

Abstract. Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most significant greenhouse gas and its concentration is continuously increasing mainly as a consequence of anthropogenic activities. Accurate quantification of CO2 is critical for addressing the global challenge of climate change and designing mitigation strategies aimed at stabilizing the CO2 emissions. Satellites provide the most effective way to monitor the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. In this study, we utilized the concentration of column-averaged dry-air mole fraction of CO2 i.e., XCO2 retrieved from a CO2 monitoring satellite, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) to estimate the anthropogenic CO2 emissions using Generalized Regression Neural Network over East and West Asia. OCO-2 XCO2 and the Open-Data Inventory for Anthropogenic Carbon dioxide (ODIAC) CO2 emission datasets for a period of 5 years (2015–2019) were used in this study. The annual XCO2 anomalies were calculated from the OCO-2 retrievals for each year to remove the larger background CO2 concentrations and seasonal variabilities. Then the XCO2 anomaly and ODIAC emission datasets from 2015 to 2018 were used to train the GRNN model, and finally, the anthropogenic CO2 emissions were estimated for 2019 based on the XCO2 anomalies derived for the same year. The XCO2-based estimated and the ODIAC actual CO2 emissions were compared and the results showed a good agreement in terms of spatial distribution. The CO2 emissions were estimated separately over East and West Asia. In addition, correlations between the ODIAC emissions and XCO2 anomalies were also determined separately for East and West Asia, and East Asia exhibited relatively better results. The results showed that satellite-based XCO2 retrievals can be used to estimate the regional scale anthropogenic CO2 emissions and the accuracy of the results can be enhanced by further improvement of the GRNN model with the addition of more CO2 emission and concentration datasets.