MATH Seminar
| Title: Three case studies in greenhouse gas emissions – new insights provided by an expanded atmospheric observing network |
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| Seminar: Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing |
| Speaker: Scot Miller of Johns Hopkins University |
| Contact: Julianne Chung, jmchung@emory.edu |
| Date: 2022-12-07 at 10:00AM |
| Venue: MSC W201 |
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| Abstract: The global record of greenhouse gas measurements is growing rapidly with the launch of several new satellites and an expansion of ground-based monitoring. This new era of big data is set to transform scientific understanding of greenhouse gas emissions, but the volume of new data creates numerous computational challenges for inverse or emissions models that were originally designed for a small number of ground-based observing stations. The beginning of the talk will focus on new, transformative statistical and mathematical approaches to understand emissions using massive satellite datasets. Then, we will apply these techniques to three different case studies in greenhouse gas emissions. The first case study will focus on carbon dioxide sources and sinks estimated using NASA's OCO-2 satellite. Using this data, we find that most existing biogeochemical models underestimate the seasonal amplitude of the global carbon cycle, and we argue that the impacts of climate change on this aspect of the carbon cycle may be larger than previously believed. The second part of the talk focuses on methane emissions from China, the world's largest emitter of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. We specifically use satellite observations to evaluate the success of China's methane emissions policies. Lastly, we will discuss an often-overlooked greenhouse gas called sulfuryl fluoride, which has surprising and unexpected implications for greenhouse gas emissions targets within the US. |
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