Assessing the Effectiveness of an Urban CO₂ Monitoring Network over the Paris Region through the COVID-19 Lockdown...

The Paris metropolitan area, the largest urban region in the European Union, has experienced two national COVID-19 confinements in 2020 with different levels of restrictions on mobility and economic activity, which caused reductions in CO₂ emissions. To quantify the timing and magnitude of daily emission reductions during the two lockdowns, we used continuous atmospheric CO₂ monitoring, a new high-resolution near-real-time emission inventory, and an atmospheric Bayesian inverse model. The atmospheric inversion estimated the changes in fossil fuel CO₂ emissions over the Greater Paris region during the two lockdowns, in comparison with the same periods in 2018 and 2019. It shows decreases by 42-53% during the first lockdown with stringent measures and by only 20% during the second lockdown when traffic reduction was weaker. Both lockdown emission reductions are mainly due to decreases in traffic. These results are consistent with independent estimates based on activity data made by the city environmental agency. We also show that unusual persistent anticyclonic weather patterns with north-easterly winds that prevailed at the start of the first lockdown period contributed a substantial drop in measured CO₂ concentration enhancements over Paris, superimposed on the reduction of urban CO₂ emissions. We conclude that atmospheric CO₂ monitoring makes it possible to identify significant emission changes (>20%) at subannual time scales over an urban region.