Bo Zheng

Tsinghua University | TH · Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School

As part of the REgional Carbon Cycle Assessment and Processes Phase 2 (RECCAP2) project, we developed a comprehensive African Greenhouse gases (GHG) budget for the period 2010-2019 and compared it to the budget over the 1985-2009 (RECCAP1) period. We considered bottom-up process-based models, data-driven remotely sensed products, and national GHG i...

China is now confronting the intertwined challenges of air pollution and climate change. Given the high synergies between air pollution abatement and climate change mitigation, the Chinese government is actively promoting synergetic control of these two issues. The Synergetic Roadmap project was launched in 2021 to track and analyze the progress of...

Near-surface ozone pollution, associated with complex responses to changing precursor emissions and meteorological conditions, has become one of the biggest challenges in China’s air quality management. Here, we present the spatiotemporal evolution of ozone concentrations from 2010 to 2021 using measurements of the national air quality monitoring n...

The long-term net sink of carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the northern permafrost region is projected to weaken or shift under climate change. But large uncertainties remain, even on present-day GHG budgets. We compare bottom-up (data-driven upscaling, process-based models) and top-down budgets (atmospheric inversion models)...

Response actions to the coronavirus disease 2019 perturbed economies and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The Omicron variant that emerged in 2022 caused more substantial infections than in 2020 and 2021 but it has not yet been ascertained whether Omicron interrupted the temporary post-2021 rebound of CO2 emissions. Here, using satellite nitrogen di...

With the urgent need to implement the EU countries pledges and to monitor the effectiveness of Green Deal plan, Monitoring Reporting and Verification tools are needed to track how emissions are changing for all the sectors. Current official inventories only provide annual estimates of national CO2 emissions with a lag of 1+ year which do not captur...

East Asia (China, Japan, Koreas and Mongolia) has been the world’s economic engine over at least the past two decades, exhibiting a rapid increase in fossil fuel emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and has expressed the recent ambition to achieve climate neutrality by mid-century. However, the GHG balance of its terrestrial ecosystems remains poor...

China’s clean air actions since 2013 have led to dramatic changes in air pollutant emissions and surface air quality. Here, we investigated the trends and drivers of air pollutant emissions during the two phases of clean air actions (i.e., Phase I from 2013–2017 and Phase II from 2018–2020) in China. We estimated decreasing trends of nonmethane vol...

It is well recognized that carbon dioxide and air pollutants share similar emission sources so that synergetic policies on climate change mitigation and air pollution control can lead to remarkable co-benefits on greenhouse gas reduction, air quality improvement, and improved health. In the context of carbon peak, carbon neutrality, and clean air p...

Abundant emissions have made China as one of the hotpots of atmospheric reactive nitrogen (Nr) deposition over the world. Here we conducted multi‐year simulation and explored the trend and interannual variations (IAVs) of China's Nr deposition for different forms (wet and dry) and species (oxidized and reduced nitrogen, OXN and RDN) during 2008–201...

Vehicle emissions are regarded as a primary contributor to air pollution and related adverse health impacts. Heavy traffic congestion increases traffic flow and thus produces more O3 precursor emissions, leading to more adverse air quality issues. Although the development of a vehicle emission inventory has received great concern and continuous eff...

Extreme wildfires are becoming more common and increasingly affecting Earth’s climate. Wildfires in boreal forests have attracted much less attention than those in tropical forests, although boreal forests are one of the most extensive biomes on Earth and are experiencing the fastest warming. We used a satellite-based atmospheric inversion system t...

The methane chemical sink estimated by atmospheric chemistry models (bottom-up method) is significantly larger than estimates based on methyl chloroform (MCF) inversions (top-down method). The difference is partly attributable to large uncertainties in hydroxyl radical (OH) concentrations simulated by the atmospheric chemistry models used to derive...

Atmospheric methane growth reached an exceptionally high rate of 15.1 ± 0.4 parts per billion per year in 2020 despite a probable decrease in anthropogenic methane emissions during COVID-19 lockdowns1. Here we quantify changes in methane sources and in its atmospheric sink in 2020 compared with 2019. We find that, globally, total anthropogenic emis...

We present a model analysis that quantifies the influence of anthropogenic emission variations on the recent (2005–2015) and future (2030) changes in national scale nitrogen deposition in China and the interacting relationships between their emissions and depositions. We find that the 0.39 Tg N yr⁻¹ increase in the dry deposition of reduced nitroge...

Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere in a changing climate is critical to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we describe and synthesize data sets...

With the urgent need to implement the EU countries pledges and to monitor the effectiveness of Green Deal plan, Monitoring Reporting and Verification tools are needed to track how emissions are changing for all the sectors. Current official inventories only provide annual estimates of national CO$_2$ emissions with a lag of 1+ year which do not cap...

The past three decades have witnessed the dramatic expansion of global biomass‐ and fossil fuel‐fired power plants, but the tremendously diverse power infrastructure shapes different spatial and temporal CO2 emission characteristics. Here, by combining Global Power plant Emissions Database (GPED v1.1) constructed in this study and the previously de...

Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere in a changing climate is critical to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we describe and synthesise data sets...

Vehicle emission is regarded as a primary contributor to air pollution and related adverse health impacts. Heavy traffic congestion increases traffic flow and thus produces more O3 precursors emissions, leading to more adverse air quality issues. Although the development of vehicle emission inventory has received great concern and continuous effort...

Australia experienced multi-year drought and record high temperatures, and massive forest fires occurred across the southeast in 2019 and early 2020. In the fire-affected forest areas, understory and often tree canopies were burned, and in-situ observations in late 2020 reported rapid vegetation recovery, including grasses, shrubs, and tree canopie...

The methane chemical sink estimated by atmospheric chemistry models (bottom-up method) is significantly larger than estimates based on methyl-chloroform (MCF) inversions (top-down method). The difference is partly attributable to large uncertainties in hydroxyl radical (OH) concentrations simulated by the atmospheric chemistry models used to derive...

Climate change mitigation measures can yield substantial air quality improvements while emerging clean air measures in developing countries can also lead to CO 2 emission mitigation co-benefits by affecting the local energy system. Here, we evaluate the effect of China’s stringent clean air actions on its energy use and CO 2 emissions from 2013-202...

Understanding carbon sources and sinks across the Earth's surface is fundamental in climate science and policy; thus, these topics have been extensively studied but have yet to be fully resolved and are associated with massive debate regarding the sign and magnitude of the carbon budget from global to regional scales. Developing new models and esti...

Day-to-day changes in CO2 emissions from human activities, in particular fossil-fuel combustion and cement production, reflect a complex balance of influences from seasonality, working days, weather and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we provide a daily CO2 emissions dataset for the whole year of 2020, calculated from inventory and nea...

Although it's well known that the carbon intensity from passenger transport of cities varies widely, few studies assessed the disparities of that in city-level and its underlying factors due to the limited availability of data, and thus developed effective strategies for different types of cities. This study is the first to present a comprehensive...

Rising emissions from wildfires over recent decades in the Pacific Northwest are known to counteract the reductions in human-produced aerosol pollution over North America. Since amplified Pacific Northwest wildfires are predicted under accelerating climate change, it is essential to understand both local and transported contributions to air polluti...

Global industrialization and urbanization processes enabled a diverse cement production boom over the past three decades, as cement is the most important building construction material. Consequently, the cement industry is the second-largest industrial CO 2 emitter (~25% of global industrial CO 2 emissions) globally. In this study, the Global Cemen...

Global CO2 emissions in 2021 were only 1% less than the record levels of 2019, driven by increases in power- and industry-related emissions from China and India and a return of the carbon intensity of electricity to pre-pandemic levels. Is this resumed growth in fossil energy, or a final fleeting surge before a long decline?

Understanding carbon sources and sinks across the Earth’s surface is fundamental in climate science and policy; thus, these topics have been extensively studied but have yet to be fully resolved and are associated with massive debate regarding the sign and magnitude of the carbon budget from global to regional scales. Developing new models and esti...

Plain Language Summary In the wake of the Paris Climate Agreement, there is an increasing need to monitor emissions from fossil fuel combustion around the world. For CO2 in particular, satellite imagers are being designed to observe the emission plumes from large point sources and intense urban area sources. In order to assess their potential, we h...

Swift changes in both industrialization and pollution control in China over the past 15 years have created a complex and evolving relationship between emission sources and the depositional sinks of air pollutants. Here, by combining an emissions inventory, an air quality model and a statistical model to estimate bulk deposition (wet plus a part of...

The measures taken to contain the spread of COVID-19 in 2020 included restrictions of people's mobility and reductions in economic activities. These drastic changes in daily life, enforced through national lockdowns, led to abrupt reductions of anthropogenic CO2 emissions in urbanized areas all over the world. To examine the effect of social restri...

Understanding the spatial patterns of atmospheric pollutants in urban and suburban areas is important for evaluating their effects on regional air quality, climate, and human health. The analyses of pollutant monitoring data of the China National Environmental Monitoring Center revealed that the differences in the concentrations of ambient O3, PM2....

Regional land carbon budgets provide insights into the spatial distribution of the land uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide and can be used to evaluate carbon cycle models and to define baselines for land-based additional mitigation efforts. The scientific community has been involved in providing observation-based estimates of regional carbon budg...

Atmospheric deposition of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is equivalent to the magnitude of riverine export of DOC to the oceans. Interpreting the fluctuations of DOC in precipitation is therefore useful in understanding the global carbon balance. This study measured DOC in 137 rain events collected from November 2016 to November 2020 at a rural sit...

Global trends in tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO2) have changed dramatically in the past decade. Here, we investigate tropospheric NO2 variabilities over United States, Europe, and E. China in 2005–2018 to explore the mechanisms governing the variation of this critical pollutant. We found large uncertainties in the trends of anthropogenic nitroge...

The past three decades have witnessed the dramatic expansion of global biomass- and fossil fuel-fired power plants, but the tremendously diverse power infrastructure shapes different spatial and temporal CO2 emission characteristics. Here, by combining Global Power plant Emissions Database (GPED v1.1) constructed in this study and the previously de...

Following a continuous increase in the surface ozone (O3) level from 2013 to 2019, the overall summertime O3 concentrations across China showed a significant reduction in 2020. In contrast to this overall reduction in surface O3 across China, unexpected surface O3 enhancements of 10.2 ± 0.8 ppbv (23.4 %) were observed in May–June 2020 (relative to...

Non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOC) are important precursors of ozone and secondary organic aerosols in PM2.5 (particulate matter with aerodynamic diameters smaller than 2.5 μm), both of which cause severe climate, ecosystem, and human health damages. As one of the major anthropogenic sources, onroad vehicles are subject to relatively la...

China’s nationwide monitoring network initiated in 2013 has witnessed continuous increases of urban summertime surface ozone to 2019 by about 5% year ⁻¹ , among the fastest ozone trends in the recent decade reported in the Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report. Here we report that surface ozone levels averaged over cities in eastern China cities dec...

Precise and high-resolution carbon dioxide (CO2) emission data is of great importance of achieving the carbon neutrality around the world. Here we present for the first time the near-real-time Global Gridded Daily CO2 Emissions Dataset (called GRACED) from fossil fuel and cement production with a global spatial-resolution of 0.1° by 0.1° and a temp...

China has experienced dramatic changes in emissions since 2010, which accelerated following the implementation of the Clean Air Action program in 2013. These changes have resulted in significant air quality improvements that are reflected in observations from both surface networks and satellite observations. Air pollutants, such as PM2.5, surface o...

Free tropospheric ozone (O3) trends in the Central East China (CEC) and export regions are investigated for 2008–2017 using the IASI (Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer) O3 observations and the LMDZ-OR-INCA model simulations, including the most recent Chinese emission inventory. The observed and modelled trends in the CEC region are −0.07...

Global CO2 emissions have rebounded strongly from the historic decrease caused by the COVID 19 pandemic in 2020. We project 2021 emissions will be only 0.9% less than the record levels of 2019. In particular, power- and industry-related emissions in China and India have increased relative to 2019, and the carbon intensity of electricity used worldw...

Satellites have detected a global decline in burned area of grassland, coincident with a small increase in burned forest area. These contrasting trends have been reported in earlier literature; however, less is known of their impacts on global fire emission trends due to the scarcity of direct observations. We use an atmospheric inversion system to...

After a continuous increase in surface ozone (O3) level from 2013 to 2019, the overall summertime O3 concentration across China showed a significant reduction in 2020. In contrast to this overall reduction in surface O3 across China, unexpected surface O3 enhancements of 10.2 ± 0.8 ppbv (23.4 %) were observed in May–June 2020 vs. 2019 over the Sich...

Between 2002 and 2017, China’s gross domestic product grew by 284%, but this surge was accompanied by a similarly prodigious growth in energy consumption, air pollution and air pollution-related deaths. Here we use a combination of index decomposition analysis and chemical transport modelling to quantify the relative influence of eight different fa...

Emission regulations of the power and industry sectors have been identified as the major driver of PM2.5 mitigation over China during 2013-2017. In this study, we use ground-based observations of four air pollutants (CO, NO2, SO2, and PM2.5) to show that additional stringent emission policies on the industrial, transportation, and residential secto...

The ongoing development of the Global Carbon Project (GCP) global methane (CH4) budget shows a continuation of increasing CH4 emissions and CH4 accumulation in the atmosphere over 2000‐2017. Here we decompose the global budget into 19 regions (18 land and one oceanic) and five key source sectors to spatially attribute the observed global trends. A...

After stagnating in the early 2000s, the atmospheric methane growth rate has been positive since 2007 with a significant acceleration starting in 2014. While the causes for previous growth rate variations are still not well determined, this recent increase can be studied with dense surface and satellite observations. Here, we use an ensemble of six...

The Australian governmental agencies reported a total of 149 million ha forest in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in 2010, ranking sixth in the world, which is based on a forest definition with tree height > 2 meters . Here, we report a new forest cover data product that used the FAO forest definition ( tree cover...

Intensive agricultural activities in the North China Plain (NCP) lead to substantial emissions of nitrogen oxides (NO x ) from soil, while the role of this source on local severe ozone pollution is unknown. Here we use a mechanistic parameterization of soil NO x emissions combined with two atmospheric chemistry models to investigate the issue. We f...

Air pollution has altered the Earth’s radiation balance, disturbed the ecosystem, and increased human morbidity and mortality. Accordingly, a full-coverage high-resolution air pollutant data set with timely updates and historical long-term records is essential to support both research and environmental management. Here, for the first time, we devel...

Ethane (C2H6) is an important greenhouse gas and plays a significant role in tropospheric chemistry and climate change. This study first presents and then quantifies the variability, sources, and transport of C2H6 over densely populated and highly industrialized eastern China using ground-based high-resolution Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) remo...