Kevin Robert Gurney

Kevin Robert Gurney
Northern Arizona University | NAU · School of Informatics Computing and Cyber Systems

Ph.D

About

278
Publications
55,965
Reads
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18,185
Citations
Additional affiliations
August 2018 - August 2021
Northern Arizona University
Position
  • Professor (Full)
October 2005 - August 2010
Purdue University West Lafayette
Position
  • Professor (Associate)

Publications

Publications (278)
Article
Full-text available
This paper introduces and describes a dataset representing United States carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from electricity consumption (scope 2 CO2 emissions) for the 2019–2021 time period separately for the residential, commercial, and industrial sectors. The spatial resolution is the U.S. census block group at annual time resolution. We also provid...
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Accurate estimation of planetary greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at the scale of individual emitting activities is a critical need for both scientific and policy applications. Powerplants represent the single largest and most concentrated form of global GHG emissions. Climate Trace, co-founded and promoted by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, is a...
Article
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Gridded bottom-up inventories of CO2 emissions are needed in global CO2 inversion schemes as priors to initialize transport models and as a complement to top-down estimates to identify the anthropogenic sources. Global inversions require gridded datasets almost in near-real time that are spatially and methodologically consistent at a global scale....
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Quantitative assessment of greenhouse gas emissions is an essential step to plan, track, and verify emission reductions. Multiple approaches have been taken to quantify U.S. CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion (FFCO2), the primary driver of global climate change. A 2020 study analyzing atmospheric 14CO2 observations (a key check on bottom-up...
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Methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, has a short atmospheric lifetime ( ~ 12 years), so that emissions reductions will have a rapid impact on climate forcing. In megacities such as Los Angeles (LA), natural gas (NG) leakage is the primary atmospheric methane source. The magnitudes and trends of fugitive NG emissions are largely unknown and need to b...
Preprint
Full-text available
Gridded bottom-up inventories of CO2 emissions are needed in global CO2 inversion schemes as priors to initialize transport models, and as a complement to top-down estimates to identify the anthropogenic sources. Global inversions require gridded datasets almost in near-real time that are spatially and methodologically consistent at a global scale....
Article
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We use a globally consistent, time-resolved data set of CO2 emission proxies to quantify urban CO2 emissions in 91 cities. We decompose emission trends into contributions from changes in urban extent, population density and per capita emission. We find that urban CO2 emissions are increasing everywhere but that the dominant contributors differ acco...
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Abstract Accurate, high‐resolution and sector‐specific greenhouse gas emissions information is increasingly needed for the development of local, targeted mitigation policies. We describe a detailed, spatially and temporally resolved CO2 emissions data product, Mahuika‐Auckland, for Auckland, New Zealand, based on Auckland's regional greenhouse gas...
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Building on near-real-time and spatially explicit estimates of daily carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, here we present and analyze a new city-level dataset of fossil fuel and cement emissions, Carbon Monitor Cities, which provides daily estimates of emissions from January 2019 through December 2021 for 1500 cities in 46 countries, and disaggregates f...
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We present the comparison of source-partitioned CO2 flux measurements with a high-resolution urban CO2 emissions inventory (Hestia). Tower-based measurements of CO and ¹⁴C are used to partition net CO2 flux measurements into fossil and biogenic components. A flux footprint model is used to quantify spatial variation in flux measurements. We compare...
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Appropriate techniques to quantify greenhouse gas emission reductions in cities over time are necessary to monitor the progress of these efforts and effectively inform continuing mitigation. We introduce a scaling factor (SF) method that combines aircraft measurements and dispersion modeling to estimate urban emissions and apply it to 9 nongrowing...
Preprint
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Building on near-real-time and spatially explicit estimates of daily carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, here we present and analyze a new city-level dataset of fossil fuel and cement emissions. Carbon Monitor Cities provides daily, city-level estimates of emissions from January 2019 through December 2021 for 1500 cities in 46 countries, and disaggrega...
Article
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City-level CO2 emissions inventories are foundational for supporting the EU's decarbonization goals. Inventories are essential for priority setting and for estimating impacts from the decarbonization transition. Here we present a new CO2 emissions inventory for all 116 572 municipal and local-government units in Europe, containing 108 000 cities at...
Article
Projections of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are critical to enable a better understanding and anticipation of future climate change under different socioeconomic conditions and mitigation strategies. The climate projections and scenarios assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, following the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP)-Re...
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Cities are greenhouse gas emission hot spots, making them targets for emission reduction policies. Effective emission reduction policies must be supported by accurate and transparent emissions accounting. Top-down approaches to emissions estimation, based on atmospheric greenhouse gas measurements, are an important and complementary tool to assess,...
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Significance The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns caused significant changes to human activity that temporarily altered our imprint on the atmosphere, providing a brief glimpse of potential future changes in atmospheric composition. This event demonstrated key feedbacks within and between air quality and the carbon cycle: Improvements in...
Preprint
Full-text available
City-level CO2 emissions inventories are foundational for supporting the EU’s decarbonization goals. Inventories are essential for priority setting and for estimating impacts from the decarbonization transition. Here we present a new CO2 emissions inventory for 116,572 municipal and local government units in Europe. The inventory spatially disaggre...
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A credible assessment of a city’s greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation policies requires a valid account of a city’s emissions. However, questions persist as to whether cities’ ‘self-reported inventories’ (SRIs) are accurate, precise, and consistent enough to track progress toward city mitigation goals. Although useful for broad policy initiatives, city...
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Responses to COVID-19 have resulted in unintended reductions of city-scale carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Here, we detect and estimate decreases in CO2 emissions in Los Angeles and Washington DC/Baltimore during March and April 2020. We present three lines of evidence using methods that have increasing model dependency, including an inverse model...
Article
Nitrous oxide (N2O) is an important greenhouse gas contributing both to global radiative forcing and ozone depletion. Though N2O emissions are largely derived from agricultural activities, urban sources of N2O also contribute significantly to anthropogenic emissions, but are not well understood and difficult to quantify. This study employs a top-do...
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Cities dominate greenhouse gas emissions. Many have generated self-reported emission inventories, but their value to emissions mitigation depends on their accuracy, which remains untested. Here, we compare self-reported inventories from 48 US cities to independent estimates from the Vulcan carbon dioxide emissions data product, which is consistent...
Article
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Background Networks of tower-based CO 2 mole fraction sensors have been deployed by various groups in and around cities across the world to quantify anthropogenic CO 2 emissions from metropolitan areas. A critical aspect in these approaches is the separation of atmospheric signatures from distant sources and sinks (i.e., the background) from local...
Article
Urban environments are characterized by pronounced spatiotemporal heterogeneity, which can present sampling challenges when utilizing conventional greenhouse gas (GHG) measurement systems. In Salt Lake City, Utah, a GHG instrument was deployed on a light rail train car that continuously traverses the Salt Lake Valley (SLV) through a range of urban...
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Background: Cities contribute more than 70% of global anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and are leading the effort to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through sustainable planning and development. However, urban greenhouse gas mitigation often relies on self-reported emissions estimates that may be incomplete and unverifiable via a...
Article
Full-text available
Estimates of high‐resolution greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have become a critical component of climate change research and an aid to decision makers considering GHG mitigation opportunities. The “Vulcan Project” is an effort to estimate bottom‐up carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production (FFCO2) for the U.S. landsc...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Networks of tower-based CO2 mole fraction sensors have been deployed in and around cities across the world to quantify anthropogenic CO2 emissions from metropolitan areas. A critical aspect in these approaches is the separation of atmospheric signatures from distant sources and sinks (i.e., the background) from local emissions and biogen...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Networks of tower-based CO2 mole fraction sensors have been deployed in and around cities across the world to quantify anthropogenic CO2 emissions from metropolitan areas. A critical aspect in these approaches is the separation of atmospheric signatures from distant sources and sinks (i.e., the background) from local emissions and biogen...
Article
Global fossil fuel carbon dioxide (FFCO2) emissions will be dictated to a great degree by the trajectory of emissions from urban areas. Conventional methods to quantify urban FFCO2 emissions typically rely on self-reported economic/energy activity data transformed into emissions via standard emission factors. However, uncertainties in these traditi...
Article
The bottom-up (BU) approach has been used to develop spatio-temporally resolved, sectorally disaggregated fossil fuel CO2 (FFCO2) emissions data products. These efforts are critical constraints to atmospheric assessment of anthropogenic fluxes in addition to offering the climate change policymaking community usable information to guide mitigation....
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Full-text available
Transportation accounts for 18% of global fossil fuel carbon dioxide (FFCO2) emissions, especially in urban areas. An improved understanding of on-road FFCO2 emissions is essential to both carbon science and mitigation policy. Previous studies have identified the driving factors and quantified their relationship to on-road FFCO2 emissions. However,...
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The UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) requires the nations of the world to report their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The independent verification of these reported emissions is a cornerstone for advancing towards the emission accounting and reduction measures agreed upon in the Paris Agreement. In this paper, we pres...
Article
Significance The vast majority of the world’s nations have pledged to reduce emissions of CO 2 and other greenhouse gases and to track and report emissions using accounting methods based on economic statistics and emissions factors. Here, we present an independent method of emissions monitoring based directly on atmospheric observations and the str...
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Increasing society’s resilience to high-impact natural events requires coordinated research and new investments in observation and prediction. To enable all nations to benefit from these investments, scientific and technical advancements need to be more accessible and usable. The new research strategy of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO),...
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To study emissions of CO2 in the Baltimore, MD‐Washington, D.C. (Balt‐Wash) area, an aircraft campaign was conducted in February 2015, as part of the Fluxes of Atmospheric Greenhouse‐Gases in Maryland (FLAGG‐MD) project. During the campaign, elevated mole fractions of CO2 were observed downwind of the urban center and local power plants. Upwind fli...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Cities contribute more than 70% of global anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and are leading the effort to reduce GHG emissions through sustainable planning and development. However, urban greenhouse gas mitigation often relies on self-reported emissions estimates that may be incomplete and unverifiable via atmospheric monitori...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Cities contribute more than 70% of global anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2 ) emissions and are leading the effort to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through sustainable planning and development. However, urban greenhouse gas mitigation often relies on self-reported emissions estimates that may be incomplete and unverifiable via at...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background: Cities contribute more than 70% of global anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and are leading the effort to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through sustainable planning and development. However, urban greenhouse gas mitigation often relies on self-reported emissions estimates that may be incomplete and unverifiable via at...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Cities contribute more than 70% of global anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and are leading the effort to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through sustainable planning and development. However, urban greenhouse gas mitigation often relies on self-reported emissions estimates that may be incomplete and unverifiable via atm...
Article
Full-text available
We conducted regional scale CO2 simulations using the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) coupled with the Vegetation Photosynthesis and Respiration Model (VPRM). We contrasted simulated concentrations with column, ground and aircraft observations during the Korea-United States Air Quality (KORUS-AQ) 2016 field campaign. Overall, WRF-VPRM...
Preprint
Full-text available
Abstract. The UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) requires the nations of the world to report their carbon dioxide (CO<sub>2</sub>) emissions. Independent verification of these reported emissions is a corner stone for advancing towards emission accounting and reduction measures agreed upon in the Paris agreement. In this...
Article
This paper presents the concept of a space-borne imaging spectrometer targeting the routine monitoring of CO2 emissions from localized point sources down to an emission strength of about 1 MtCO2/yr. Using high-resolution CO2 emission and albedo data, it is shown that CO2 plumes from point sources with an emission strength down to the order of 0.3 M...
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This paper introduces a new algorithm (BUNTUS-Built-up, Nighttime Light, and Travel time for Urban Size) using remote sensing techniques to delineate urban boundaries. The paper is part of a larger study of the role of urbanisation in changing fossil fuel emissions. The method combines estimates of land cover, nighttime lights, and travel times to...
Preprint
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Abstract. Estimates of greenhouse gas emissions, quantified at fine space and time scales, has become a critical component of new multi-constraint flux information systems in addition to providing relevant information to decisionmakers when considering GHG mitigation opportunities. The Vulcan Project is an effort to estimate bottom-up fossil fuel e...
Article
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Plain Language Summary The uncertainty in biospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) flux estimates drives divergent projections of future climate and uncertainty in prescriptions for climate mitigation. The terrestrial carbon sink can be inferred from atmospheric CO2 observations with transport models via inversion methods. Regional CO2 flux estimates remain...
Article
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The WMO convened the “Science Summit on Seamless Research for Weather, Climate, Water, and Environment” to guide the Commission for Atmospheric Sciences (CAS-17) on future scientific research needs and requirements. Whether on an urban or planetary scale, covering timescales of a few minutes or a few decades, the societal need for more accurate wea...
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Top-down, data-driven models possess ample power to improve the accuracy of bottom-up carbon dioxide (CO2) emission inventories, and more work is needed to explore the merger of top-down and bottom-up estimates to better inform the metrics used to monitor global CO2 fluxes. Here we present a Bayesian inverse modeling framework over Salt Lake City,...
Article
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High-resolution bottom-up estimation provides a detailed guide for city greenhouse gas mitigation options, offering details that can increase the economic efficiency of emissions reduction options and synergize with other urban policy priorities at the human scale. As a critical constraint to urban atmospheric CO2 inversion studies, bottom-up spati...
Preprint
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Current uncertainty in quantifying the global carbon budget remains a major contributing source of uncertainty in reliably projecting future climate change. Furthermore, quantifying the global carbon budget and characterizing uncertainties have emerged as critical to a successful implementation of United National Framework Convention on Climate Cha...
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Legislation in the State of California mandates reductions in emissions of short‐lived climate pollutants of 40% from 2013 levels by 2030 for CH4. Identification of the sector(s) responsible for these emissions and their temporal and spatial variability is a key step in achieving these goals. Here, we determine the emissions of CH4 in Los Angeles (...
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A large fraction of fossil fuel CO2 emissions emanate from “hotspots”, such as cities (where direct CO2 emissions related to fossil fuel combustion in transport, residential, commercial sectors, etc., excluding emissions from electricity-producing power plants, occur), isolated power plants, and manufacturing facilities, which cover a small fractio...
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Spatiotemporally resolved urban fossil fuel CO2 (FFCO2) emissions are critical to urban carbon cycle research and urban climate policy. Two general scientific approaches have been taken to estimate spatiotemporally explicit urban FFCO2 fluxes, referred to here as “downscaling” and “bottom‐up.” Bottom‐up approaches can specifically characterize the...
Article
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As a critical constraint to atmospheric CO2 inversion studies, bottom-up spatiotemporally-explicit emissions data products are necessary to construct comprehensive CO2 emission information systems useful for trend detection and emissions verification. High-resolution bottom-up estimation is also useful as a guide to mitigation options, offering det...
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We present a global dataset of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for 343 cities. The dataset builds upon data from CDP (187 cities, few in developing countries), the Bonn Center for Local Climate Action and Reporting (73 cities, mainly in developing countries), and data collected by Peking University (83 cities in China). The CDP data be...
Article
Combustion of fossil fuel is the dominant source of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere from California. Here, we describe radiocarbon (^(14)CO_2) measurements and atmospheric inverse modeling to estimate fossil fuel CO_2 (ffCO_2) emissions for 2009–2012 from a site in central California, and for June 2013–May 2014 from two sites in southern...
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Urban areas contribute approximately three-quarters of fossil fuel derived CO2 emissions, and many cities have enacted emissions mitigation plans. Evaluation of the effectiveness of mitigation efforts will require measurement of both the emission rate and its change over space and time. The relative performance of different emission estimation meth...
Article
Chevallier showed a column CO 2 ( XCO2 ) anomaly of ±0.5 parts per million forced by a uniform net biosphere exchange (NBE) anomaly of 2.5 gigatonnes of carbon over the tropical continents within a year, so he claimed that the inferred NBE uncertainties should be larger than presented in Liu et al . We show that a much concentrated NBE anomaly led...