Sources of Greenhouse Gases in East Asia

China is now the largest emitter of anthropgenic CO2 greenhouse gas, yet emission inventories of CO2 and other greenhouse gases over China and more generally over east Asia are poor. Fo planning mitigation measures and attributing sources of greenhouse g ases, it is of fundamental importance to have accurate information on sources and methodologies for examining their spatial and temporal scales. This project aims to utilise a new greenhouse gas inversion scheme, powered by the best in situ greenhouse ga s measurements available over eastern Asia, and augmented with existing and new satellite measurements to provide an improved estimate of the Sources of Greenhouse Gases in East Asia (SoGG-EA). The project will concentrate on source inversions for haloca rbons as in situ data and a tested inversion scheme are available. The methodology will then be extended to look at CH4, which has a strong source in China, can be measured from the ground and from satellite and has a low natural variability. Finally, w e will attempt to use these developments to conduct inversions for CO2, by utilising new satellite data from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) to be launched in January 2009. The results of this work will be of value to policy makers and provide much needed information to, for example, the IPCC, and other agencies involved in assessment of the global carbon budget (e.g. the Global Carbon Project - GCP). The research results will also act as a guide to future inverse modelling studies involving other regions of the globe and other types of observations, including multi-gas inversions schemes.