A New High-Resolution On-Road CO₂ Emissions Inventory for the United States, 1980 - 2012

Conor Gately, Boston University, cgately@gmail.com (Presenter)
Lucy Hutyra, Boston University, lrhutyra@bu.edu
Ian Sue Wing, Boston University, isw@bu.edu

On-road emissions comprised 29% of U.S. fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions in 2012, with 64% of those emissions occurring in urban areas. Understanding the social, economic and technological factors that influence urban emissions requires the development of emissions inventories that are resolved at fine spatial and temporal scales. As city governments are increasingly at the forefront of developing policies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, high-resolution, bottom-up inventories will support local and regional emissions benchmarking, as well as the monitoring, reporting, and verification of emissions trends across time and space. We develop a new high-resolution national emissions inventory, DARTE (Database of Road Transportation Emissions), which reports CO₂ emitted by U.S. road transport at 1 km resolution annually for 1980-2012. We combine DARTE with a large regional dataset of hourly traffic counts to develop hourly CO₂ emissions estimates for the year 2012 across twelve states in the Northeastern U.S. The inventory scope covers several large metropolitan regions as well as many small- and medium-sized urban, suburban and exurban population centers, representing 20% of urban and 17% of total U.S. on-road CO₂ emissions in 2012. We observe significant variation in the spatial and temporal structure of vehicle emissions across urban-suburban-rural gradients, in particular during morning and evening “peak” periods, which vary in intensity and duration as a function of both spatial location and time of year. Finally we utilize data on minute-by-minute vehicle speeds to quantify traffic congestion across the Boston metropolitan area, highlighting seasonal variations in congestion, and providing first-order estimates of the additional CO₂ emissions that can be directly attributed to congestion on Boston freeways. Our results highlight the potential for mitigating vehicle emissions via time-sensitive toll pricing or commuter incentive schemes targeting peak period vehicle use on urban freeways.

Presentation Type:  Poster

Session:  Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) Posters   (Mon 1:30 PM)

Associated Project(s): 

• Nehrkorn, Thomas: Prototype Monitoring, Reporting and Verification System for the Regional Scale: The Boston-DC Corridor ...details

Poster Location ID: 149