HR: 1330h
AN: B42A-0934    [PDF]
TI: Estimates of Fossil Fuel Carbon Dioxide Emissions From Mexico at Monthly Time Intervals
AU: * Losey, L M
EM: london@space.edu
AF: University of North Dakota, Department of Space Studies, Grand Forks, ND 58202-9008 United States
AU: Andres, R J
EM: andres@space.edu
AF: University of North Dakota, Department of Space Studies, Grand Forks, ND 58202-9008 United States
AB: Human consumption of fossil fuels has greatly contributed to the rise of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. To better understand the global carbon cycle, it is important to identify the major sources of these fossil fuels. Mexico is among the top fifteen nations in the world for producing fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions. Based on this information and that emissions from Mexico are a focus of the North American Carbon Program, Mexico was selected for this study. Mexican monthly inland sales volumes for January 1988-May 2003 were collected on natural gas and liquid fuels from the Energy Information Agency in the United States Department of Energy. These sales figures represent a major portion of the total fossil fuel consumption in Mexico. The fraction of a particular fossil fuel consumed in a given month was determined by dividing the monthly sales volumes by the annual sum of monthly sales volumes for a given year. This fraction was then multiplied by the annual carbon dioxide values reported by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to estimate the monthly carbon dioxide emissions from the respective fuels. The advantages of this methodology are: 1) monthly fluxes are consistent with the annual flux as determined by the widely-accepted CDIAC values, and 2) its general application can be easily adapted to other nations for determining their sub-annual time scale emissions. The major disadvantage of this methodology is the proxy nature inherent to it. Only a fraction of the total emissions are used as an estimate in determining the seasonal cycle. The error inherent in this approach increases as the fraction of total emissions represented by the proxy decreases. These data are part of a long-term project between researchers at the University of North Dakota and ORNL which attempts to identify and understand the source(s) of seasonal variations of global, fossil-fuel derived, carbon dioxide emissions. Better knowledge of the temporal variation of the annual fossil fuel flux will lead to a better understanding of the global carbon cycle. This research will be archived at CDIAC for public access.
DE: 0322 Constituent sources and sinks
DE: 0330 Geochemical cycles
DE: 1600 GLOBAL CHANGE (New category)
DE: 1610 Atmosphere (0315, 0325)
DE: 1694 Instruments and techniques
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting