Towards spaceborne monitoring of localized CO2 emissions: an instrument concept and first performance assessment

Kurzfassung

This paper presents the concept of a spaceborne imaging spectrometer targeting the routine monitoring of CO2 emissions from localized point sources down to an emission strength of about 1 Mt CO2/yr. Using high-resolution CO2 emission and albedo data, it is shown that CO2 plumes from point sources with an emission strength down to the order of 0.3 Mt CO2/yr can be resolved in an urban environment (when limited by instrument noise only), hence leaving significant margin for additional errors.