Publication Date:
2017-07-19
Description:
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas (GHG) and a critical target of climate mitigation efforts. However, actionable emission reduction efforts are complicated by large uncertainties in the methane budget at relevant scales. Here, we present Vista, a Geographic Information System (GIS)-based approach to map potential methane emissions sources in greater Los Angeles, an area with a dense, complex mixture of sources. The goal of this work is to provide a database that, together with atmospheric observations, improves methane emissions estimates in urban areas with complex infrastructure. We aggregated methane source location information into three sectors (energy, agriculture, and waste) following the frameworks used by the State of California GHG Inventory and the IPCC Guidelines for GHG Reporting. Geospatial modelling was applied to publicly available datasets to precisely geolocate facilities and infrastructure comprising major anthropogenic methane source sectors. The final database, Vista-Los Angeles (LA), is presented as maps of infrastructure known or expected to emit methane. Vista-LA contains over 33,000 features concentrated on 〈1% of land area in the region. Currently, Vista-LA is used as a planning and analysis tool for atmospheric measurement surveys of methane sources, particularly for airborne remote sensing, and methane “hot-spot” detection using regional observations. This study represents a first step towards developing an accurate, spatially-resolved methane flux estimate for point sources in California’s South Coast Air Basin (SoCAB), with the potential to address discrepancies between bottom-up and top-down methane emissions accounting. The final Vista-LA datasets and associated metadata have been submitted to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center for Biogeochemical Dynamics (ORNL DAAC; https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1525).
Electronic ISSN:
1866-3591
Topics:
Geosciences
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