Detectability of CO2 emission plumes of cities and power plants with the Copernicus Anthropogenic CO2 Monitoring (CO2M) mission

International audienceHigh-resolution atmospheric transport simulations were used to investigate the potential for detecting carbon dioxide (CO 2) plumes of the city of Berlin and neighboring power stations with the Copernicus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Monitoring (CO2M) mission, which is a proposed constellation of CO 2 satellites with imaging capabilities. The potential for detecting plumes was studied for satellite images of CO 2 alone or in combination with images of nitrogen dioxide (NO 2) and carbon monoxide (CO) to investigate the added value of measurements of other gases co-emitted with CO 2 that have better signal-to-noise ratios. The additional NO 2 and CO images were either generated for instruments on the same CO2M satellites (2 km× 2 km resolution) or for the Sentinel-5 instrument (7.5 km× 7.5 km) assumed to fly 2 h earlier than CO2M. Realistic CO 2 , CO and NO X (= NO+NO 2) fields were simulated at 1 km× 1 km horizontal resolution with the Consortium for Small-scale Modeling model extended with a module for the simulation of greenhouse gases (COSMO-GHG) for the year 2015, and they were used as input for an orbit simulator to generate synthetic observations of columns of CO 2 , CO and NO 2 for constellations of up to six satellites. A simple plume detection algorithm was applied to detect coherent structures in the images of CO 2 , NO 2 or CO against instrument noise and variability in background levels. Although six satellites with an assumed swath of 250 km were sufficient to overpass Berlin on a daily basis, only about 50 out of 365 plumes per year could be observed in conditions suitable for emission estimation due to frequent cloud cover. With the CO 2 instrument only 6 and 16 of these 50 plumes could be detected assuming a high-noise (σ VEG50 = 1.0 ppm) and low-noise (σ VEG50 = 0.5 ppm) scenario, respectively, because the CO 2 signals were often too weak. A CO instrument with specifications similar to the Sentinel-5 mission performed worse than the CO 2 instrument, while the number of detectable plumes could be significantly increased to about 35 plumes with an NO 2 instrument. CO 2 and NO 2 plumes were found to overlap to a large extent, although NO X had a limited lifetime (assumed to be 4 h) and although CO 2 and NO X were emitted with different NO X : CO 2 emission ratios by different source types with different temporal and vertical emission profiles. Using NO 2 observations from the Sentinel-5 platform instead resulted in a significant spatial mismatch between NO 2 and CO 2 plumes due to the 2 h time difference between Sentinel-5 and CO2M. The plumes of the coal-fired power plant Jänschwalde were easier to detect with the CO 2 instrument (about 40-45 plumes per year), but, again, an NO 2 instrument could detect significantly more plumes (about 70). Auxiliary measurements of NO 2 were thus found to greatly enhance the capability of detecting the location of CO 2 plumes, which will be invaluable for the quantification of CO 2 emissions from large point sources