An approach for verifying biogenic greenhouse gas emissions inventories with atmospheric CO 2 concentration data

Verifying national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventories is a critical step to ensure that reported emissions data to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are accurate and representative of a country’s contribution to GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. Verification could include a variety of evidence, but arguably the most convincing verification would be confirmation of a change in GHG concentrations in the atmosphere that is consistent with reported emissions to the UNFCCC. We report here on a case study evaluating this option based on a prototype atmospheric CO2 measurement network deployed in the Mid-Continent Region of the conterminous United States. We found that the atmospheric CO2 measurement data did verify the accuracy of the emissions inventory within the confidence limits of the emissions estimates, suggesting that this technology could be further developed and deployed more widely in the future for verifying reported emissions.