ALBERT

Description: Complementing the bottom-up methods, the emissions inventories of chemical species of climatic and environmental importance can be derived using atmospheric inverse models, providing integrated constraints on surface fluxes from all sectors/processes. For these models a variety of observations are used, including those from ground-based, ship, aircraft and satellite platforms. In particular, recent improvements in the capability of satellite observations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and air quality (AQ) are providing great advances on spatial resolutions. Among several plans to launch the GHGs and/or AQ observing satellites in near future, a plan is in progress in Japan to launch the “Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle (GOSAT-GW)”, that will make observations of carbon dioxide (CO〈sub〉2〈/sub〉), methane (CH〈sub〉4〈/sub〉), and nitrogen dioxide (NO〈sub〉2〈/sub〉) at a horizontal resolution of 3 km or less. The missions of GOSAT-GW include (1) monitoring of whole atmosphere-mean concentrations of GHGs, (2) validation of nationwide anthropogenic emissions of GHGs, and (3) detection of GHGs emissions from large sources, such as megacities and power plants. We will provide an overview of the mission/project and some highlights on the potential roles in quantifying anthropogenic emissions from local to global scales, supporting the mitigation policies on climate change as well as air quality at both international and national levels.