The Vulcan Version 3.0 High-Resolution Fossil Fuel CO Emissions for the United States

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 (FFCO) for the U.S. landscape at space and time scales that satisfy both scientific and policy needs. Here, we report on the Vulcan version 3.0 which quantifies emissions at a resolution of 1 km/hr for the 2010-2015 time period. We estimate 2011 FFCO emissions of 1,589.9 TgC with a 95% confidence interval of 1,367/1,853 TgC (-14.0%/+16.6%), implying a one-sigma uncertainty of ~ ±8%. Per capita emissions are larger in states dominated by electricity production and industrial activity and smaller where onroad and building emissions dominate. The U.S. FFCO emissions center of mass (CoM) is located in the state of Missouri with mean seasonality that moves on a near-elliptical NE/SW path. Comparison to ODIAC, a global gridded FFCO emissions estimate, shows large total emissions differences (100.4 TgC for year 2011), a spatial correlation of 0.68 (R), and a mean absolute relative difference at the 1 km scale of 104.3%. The Vulcan data product offers a high-resolution estimate of FFCO emissions in every U.S. city, obviating costly development of self-reported urban inventories. The Vulcan v3.0 annual gridded emissions data product can be downloaded from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center (Gurney, Liang, et al., 2019, https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1741).