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Johannes W. Kaiser

Johannes W. Kaiser
Satfire Kaiser

Dr.

About

261
Publications
64,017
Reads
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17,666
Citations
Introduction
Johannes W. Kaiser is an independent scientific consultant, who is currently leading the ongoing scientific developments of the Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS), which is operated by the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for the EU's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS).
Additional affiliations
August 2014 - March 2019
Max Planck Institute for Chemistry
Position
  • Research Group Leader
August 2018 - January 2022
Deutscher Wetterdienst
Position
  • CM SAF Operations Manager
February 1992 - September 1992
University of Canterbury
Position
  • Diploma Student

Publications

Publications (261)
Article
Full-text available
Top-down approaches, such as atmospheric inversions, are a promising tool for evaluating emission estimates based on activity-data. In particular, there is a need to examine carbon budgets at subnational scales (e.g., state/province), since this is where the climate mitigation policies occur. In this study, the sub-national scale anthropogenic CO2...
Article
Full-text available
The dramatic increase of natural gas use in China, as a substitute for coal, helps to reduce CO 2 emissions and air pollution, but the climate mitigation benefit can be offset by methane leakage into the atmosphere. We estimate methane emissions from 2010 to 2018 in four regions of China using the GOSAT satellite data and in-situ observations with...
Preprint
Full-text available
The dramatic increase in natural gas use in China, as a substitute for coal, helps to reduce CO2 emissions and air pollution, but the climate mitigation benefit can be offset by methane leakage into the atmosphere. We estimate methane emissions from 2010-2018 in four regions of China using the GOSAT satellite data and in-situ observations with a hi...
Article
Full-text available
An updated and expanded representation of organics in the chemistry general circulation model EMAC (ECHAM5/MESSy for Atmospheric Chemistry) has been evaluated. First, the comprehensive Mainz Organic Mechanism (MOM) in the submodel MECCA (Module Efficiently Calculating the Chemistry of the Atmosphere) was activated with explicit degradation of organ...
Preprint
Full-text available
An updated and expanded representation of organics in the chemistry general circulation model EMAC (ECHAM5/MESSy for Atmospheric Chemistry) has been evaluated. First, the comprehensive Mainz Organic Mechanism (MOM) in the submodel MECCA (Module Efficiently Calculating the Chemistry of the Atmosphere) was activated with explicit degradation of organ...
Article
Full-text available
Ten years of Greenhouse gas Observing SATellite (GOSAT) observation achieves valuable retrievals for top-down methane (CH4) emissions estimates especially in regions lacking ground-based observations. This paper presents the long-term 2010-2017 trend in CH4 emissions in the Middle East countries. We use a global 0.1° × 0.1° high-resolution inverse...
Article
Full-text available
In Asia, much effort is put into reducing methane (CH4) emissions due to the region's contribution to the recent rapid global atmospheric CH4 concentration growth. Accurate quantification of Asia's CH4 budgets is critical for conducting global stocktake and achieving the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. In this study, we present t...
Article
Full-text available
In Asia, much effort is put into reducing methane (CH4) emissions due to the region's contribution to the recent rapid global atmospheric CH4 concentration growth. Accurate quantification of Asia's CH4 budgets is critical for conducting global stocktake and achieving the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. In this study, we present t...
Article
Full-text available
We developed a high-resolution surface flux inversion system based on the global Eulerian–Lagrangian coupled tracer transport model composed of the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) transport model (TM; collectively NIES-TM) and the FLEXible PARTicle dispersion model (FLEXPART). The inversion system is named NTFVAR (NIES-TM–FLEXPA...
Article
Full-text available
In Asia, much effort is put into reducing methane (CH4) emissions due to the region's contribution to the recent rapid global atmospheric CH4 concentration growth. Accurate quantification of Asia's CH4 budgets is critical for conducting global stocktake and achieving the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. In this study, we present t...
Article
Full-text available
Gas flares are a regionally and globally significant source of atmospheric pollutants. They can be detected by satellite remote sensing. We calculate the global flared gas volume and black carbon emissions in 2017 by applying (1) a previously developed hot spot detection and characterisation algorithm to all observations of the Sea and Land Surface...
Article
Full-text available
This article represents the current state of the art in analyzing gas flaring (GF) from space. GF is a prominent source of air pollution, with significant global and local impacts. Its emissions contribute to climate change and air pollution, and its practice is a waste of a valuable energy source. A key barrier in evaluating the status of this phe...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Zusammenfassung: Der April 2020 war in Deutschland sehr mild, extrem trocken und der sonnenscheinreichste April seit 1951. Die Aprilmonate weisen in den letzten Jahrzehnten eine stärkere Erwärmung als die Jahresdurchschnittstemperaturen auf und tendieren zu Niederschlagsdefiziten. Dies kann unter anderem mit einer Zunahme antizyklonaler Wetterlage...
Article
Full-text available
Black carbon (BC) aerosols influence the Earth's atmosphere and climate, but their microphysical properties, spatiotemporal distribution, and long-range transport are not well constrained. This study presents airborne observations of the transatlantic transport of BC-rich African biomass burning (BB) smoke into the Amazon Basin using a Single Parti...
Preprint
Full-text available
Abstract. We developed a high-resolution surface flux inversion system based on the global Lagrangian–Eulerian coupled tracer transport model composed of National Institute for Environmental Studies Transport Model (NIES-TM) and FLEXible PARTicle dispersion model (FLEXPART). The inversion system is named NTFVAR (NIES-TM-FLEXPART-variational) as it...
Article
Full-text available
Fires and the aerosols that they emit impact air quality, health, and climate, but the abundance and properties of carbonaceous aerosol (both black carbon and organic carbon) from biomass burning (BB) remain uncertain and poorly constrained. We aim to explore the uncertainties associated with fire emissions and their air quality and radiative impac...
Article
Full-text available
We employed a global high-resolution inverse model to optimize the CH4 emission using Greenhouse gas Observing Satellite (GOSAT) and surface observation data for a period from 2011–2017 for the two main source categories of anthropogenic and natural emissions. We used the Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR v4.3.2) for anthropo...
Conference Paper
We evaluated the methane emissions, its trends of regions and top emitting countries for 2010-2017 inferred from atmospheric observations. We used 8-year measurements of atmospheric methane columns from the GOSAT satellite and ground-based observations in a 0.1° × 0.1° high-resolution global model to evaluate the top-down methane emissions at count...
Preprint
Full-text available
Abstract. Fires and the aerosols that they emit impact air quality, health, and climate, but the abundance and properties of carbonaceous aerosol (both black carbon and organic carbon) from biomass burning (BB) remain uncertain and poorly constrained. We aim to quantify the uncertainties associated with fire emissions and their air quality and radi...
Article
Full-text available
We present a global 0.1 • × 0.1 • high-resolution inverse model, NIES-TM-FLEXPART-VAR (NTFVAR), and a methane emission evaluation using the Greenhouse Gas Observing Satellite (GOSAT) satellite and ground-based observations from 2010-2012. Prior fluxes contained two variants of anthropogenic emissions, Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Resea...
Article
Full-text available
Fire emissions are a critical component of carbon and nutrient cycles and strongly affect climate and air quality. Dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) with interactive fire modeling provide important estimates for long-term and large-scale changes in fire emissions. Here we present the first multi-model estimates of global gridded historical f...
Article
Full-text available
Black carbon (BC) aerosols are influencing the Earth’s atmosphere and climate, but their microphysical properties, spatiotemporal distribution and long-range transport are not well constrained. This study analyzes the transatlantic transport of BC-rich African biomass burning (BB) pollution into the Amazon Basin, based on airborne observations of a...
Preprint
Full-text available
Gas flares are a regionally and globally significant source of atmospheric pollutants. They can be detected by satellite remote sensing. We calculate the global flared gas volume and black carbon emissions in 2017 by (1) applying a previously developed hot spot detection and characterisation algorithm to all observations of the Sea and Land Surface...
Article
Full-text available
The Amazon rain forest experiences the combined pressures from human-made deforestation and progressing climate change, causing severe and potentially disruptive perturbations of the ecosystem's integrity and stability. To intensify research on critical aspects of Amazonian biosphere–atmosphere exchange, the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory (ATTO) has...
Article
Full-text available
Active fire observations with satellite instruments exhibit a well-documented increase of the detection threshold with increasing pixel footprint size, i.e., distance from the sub-satellite point. This results in a viewing angle-dependent, negative bias in gridded representations of the observed Fire Radiative Power (FRP), which in turn is frequent...
Article
Full-text available
Fire emissions are critical for carbon and nutrient cycles, climate, and air quality. Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs) with interactive fire modeling provide important estimates for long-term and large-scale changes of fire emissions. Here we present the first multi-model estimates of global gridded historical fire emissions for 1700-2012,...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Biomass burnings (including forest, grassland, peatland and agricultural fires) have important impacts on global terrestrial and atmospheric systems, affecting land cover, surface albedo, and the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, chemically reactive species and aerosols. Several products have been generated in the last years to estimat...
Article
Full-text available
Southeast Asia, in particular Indonesia, has periodically struggled with intense fire events. These events convert substantial amounts of carbon stored as peat to atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and significantly affect atmospheric composition on a regional to global scale. During the recent 2015 El Niño event, peat fires led to strong enhancement...
Article
Full-text available
In 2017, the dominant greenhouse gases released into Earth's atmosphere-carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide-reached new record highs. The annual global average carbon dioxide concentration at Earth's surface for 2017 was 405.0 ± 0.1 ppm, 2.2 ppm greater than for 2016 and the highest in the modern atmospheric measurement record and in ice cor...
Article
Full-text available
Gas flaring is a disposal process widely used in the oil extraction and processing industry. It consists in the burning of unwanted gas at the tip of a stack and due to its thermal characteristic and the thermal emission it is possible to observe and to quantify it from space. Spaceborne observations allows us to collect information across regions...
Article
Gas flaring is a disposal process widely used in the oil extraction and processing industry. It consists in the burning of unwanted gas at the tip of a stack and due to its thermal characteristic and the thermal emission it is possible to observe and to quantify it from space. Spaceborne observations allows us to collect information across regions...
Preprint
Full-text available
Gas flaring is a disposal process widely used in the oil extraction and processing industry. It consists in the burning of unwanted gas at the tip of a stack and due to its thermal characteristic and the thermal emission it is possible to observe and to quantify it from space. Spaceborne observations allows us to collect information across regions...
Article
Full-text available
The Amazon rain forest experiences the combined pressures from man-made deforestation and progressing climate change, causing severe and potentially disruptive perturbations of the ecosystem's integrity and stability. To intensify research on critical aspects of Amazonian biosphere-atmosphere exchange, the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory (ATTO) has b...
Preprint
Full-text available
Gas flaring is a disposal process widely used in the oil extraction and processing industry. It consists in the burning of unwanted gas at the tip of a stack. We have successfully adapted the VIIRS Nightfire algorithm for the detection and characterisation of gas flares to SLSTR observations on-board the Sentinel-3 satellites. A hot event at temper...
Conference Paper
Gas flaring (GF) consists in the burning of unwanted gas at the tip of a stack. It is widely used as a disposal process in the oil extraction and processing industry. We successfully adapted the VIIRS Nightfire algorithm for the detection and characterisation of gas flares at night for the SLSTR instrument on-board the Sentinel-3 satellites. The m...
Article
Full-text available
The powerful El Niño event of 2015–2016 – the third most intense since the 1950s – has exerted a large impact on the Earth’s natural climate system. The column-averaged CO_2 dry-air mole fraction (XCO_2) observations from satellites and ground-based networks are analyzed together with in situ observations for the period of September 2014 to October...
Article
Full-text available
Lagrangian particle dispersion models (LPDMs) in backward mode are widely used to quantify the impact of transboundary pollution on downwind sites. Most LPDM applications count particles with a technique that introduces a so-called footprint layer (FL) with constant height, in which passing air tracer particles are assumed to be affected by surface...
Article
Full-text available
Fires have influenced atmospheric composition and climate since the rise of vascular plants, and satellite data have shown the overall global extent of fires. Our knowledge of historic fire emissions has progressively improved over the past decades due mostly to the development of new proxies and the improvement of fire models. Currently, there is...
Article
Full-text available
Ch 7. Regional Climates: f. Europe and the Middle East
Article
Full-text available
The Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS) assimilates fire radiative power (FRP) observations from satellite-based sensors to produce daily estimates of biomass burning emissions. It has been extended to include information about injection heights derived from fire observations and meteorological information from the operational weather forecasts...
Article
Indonesia experienced an exceptional number of fires in 2015 as a result of droughts related to the recent El Niño event and human activities. These fires released large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Emission databases such as the Global Fire Assimilation System version 1.2 and the Global Fire Emission Database version 4s est...
Article
Full-text available
Fires have influenced atmospheric composition and climate since the rise of vascular plants, and satellite data has shown the overall global extent of fires. Our knowledge of historic fire emissions has progressively improved over the past decades due mostly to the development of new proxies and the improvement of fire models. Currently there is a...
Article
Full-text available
Significant uncertainties are incurred in deriving various quantities related to biomass burning from satellite measurements at different scales, and, in general, the coarser the resolution of observation the larger the uncertainty. WRF‐Chem model simulations of smoke over the northern sub‐Saharan African (NSSA) region for January–February 2010, us...
Article
Full-text available
Lagrangian particle dispersion models (LPDMs) in backward mode are widely-used to quantify the impact of transboundary pollution on downwind sites. Most LPDM applications assume mixing of surface emissions in a boundary layer that is constant in height. The height of this mixing layer (ML), however, is subject to strong spatio-temporal variability....
Chapter
Significant uncertainties are incurred in deriving various quantities related to biomass burning from satellite measurements at different scales, and, in general, the coarser the resolution of observation the larger the uncertainty. Uncertainties associated with satellite measurements can vary widely because fires occur in different ecosystems at v...
Article
Full-text available
As formaldehyde (HCHO) is a high-yield product in the oxidation of most volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by fires, vegetation, and anthropogenic activities, satellite observations of HCHO are well-suited to inform us on the spatial and temporal variability of the underlying VOC sources. The long record of space-based HCHO column observatio...
Article
Full-text available
Landscape fires occur on a large scale in (sub)tropical savannas and grasslands, affecting ecosystem dynamics, regional air quality and concentrations of atmospheric trace gasses. Fuel consumption per unit of area burned is an important but poorly constrained parameter in fire emission modelling. We combined satellite-derived burned area with fire...
Article
Full-text available
Fires associated with land use and land cover changes release large amounts of aerosols and trace gases into the atmosphere. Although several inventories of biomass burning emissions cover Brazil, there are still considerable uncertainties and differences among them. While most fire emission inventories utilize the parameters of burned area, vegeta...