ALBERT

Description: Well mixed abundances and decadal trends of carbon tetrafluoride (CF4) and nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) have been well characterised and have provided a time series of global total emissions. Information on locations of emissions contributing to the global total, however, is currently poor. We use a unique set of measurements between 2008 and 2015 from the Gosan station, Jeju Island, South Korea (part of the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment network), together with an atmospheric transport model to make spatially disaggregated emission estimates of these gases in East Asia. Owing to the poor availability of good prior information for this study our results are strongly constrained by the atmospheric measurements. Notably, we are able to highlight emissions hotspots of NF3 and CF4 in South Korea, owing to the measurement location. We calculate emissions of CF4 to be quite constant between years 2008 and 2015 for both China and South Korea with 2015 emissions calculated at 4.33 ± 2.65 Gg yr−1 and 0.36 ± 0.11 Gg yr−1, respectively. Emission estimates of NF3 from South Korea could be made with relatively small uncertainty at 0.6 ± 0.07 Gg yr−1 in 2015, which equates to ~ 1.6 % of the country's CO2 emissions. We also apply our method to calculate emissions of CHF3 (HFC-23) between 2008 and 2012, for which our results find good agreement with other studies and which helps support our choice in methodology for CF4 and NF3.