A new methodology for quantifying on-site residential and commercial fossil fuel CO2 emissions at the building spatial scale and hourly time scale

45 ISSN 1758-3004 10.4155/CMT.10.7 © 2010 Future Science Ltd CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion are the largest net annual flux of carbon in the earth–atmosphere system and represent the dominant source of greenhouse gas forcing [1]. In order to better understand other components of carbon exchange between the land, oceans and atmosphere, improved quantification of fossil fuel CO2 fluxes are needed, because the fossil fuel CO2 emissions component is often used as a boundary condition with low uncertainty when solving total carbon budgets [2]. Furthermore, US domestic climate change legislation is currently under consideration and requires both improved quantification of fluxes in order to establish emission baselines and identify of efficient and economically viable mitigation options. Both of these needs place importance on the quantification of fossil fuel CO2 fluxes at finer space and time scales than have been achieved in the past [3]. At the global scale, fossil fuel CO2 emissions had been resolved at the 1 × 1° spatial scale and, most commonly, on an annual time scale [4,5,101]. These inventories were constructed by distributing fossil fuel CO2 emissions to the 1° grid using population density as a spatial proxy. These population-based inventories are useful in global studies but there are significant limitations to their use, since both scientific research and policy needs have begun to focus on regional understanding [6]. For example, at the county or state scale, population density is a poor predictor of large point sources, such as power plants, which are often not co-located with population centers [7]. Furthermore, the population-based inventories are not disaggregated by the economic sector, which is often a useful identifier in policy-making efforts and atmospheric monitoring, where multiple species such as carbon monoxide, 13C and 14C are used to identify emission sources [8–10]. Carbon Management (2010) 1(1), 45–56 A new methodology for quantifying on-site residential and commercial fossil fuel CO2 emissions at the building spatial scale and hourly time scale