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Tim Arnold

Tim Arnold

Associate Professor

Tim Arnold

Reconciling reported and unreported HFC emissions with atmospheric observations

Author

  • Mark F. Lunt
  • Matthew Rigby
  • Anita L. Ganesan
  • Alistair J. Manning
  • Ronald G. Prinn
  • Simon O'Doherty
  • Jens Mühle
  • Christina M. Harth
  • Peter K. Salameh
  • Tim Arnold
  • Ray F. Weiss
  • Takuya Saito
  • Yoko Yokouchi
  • Paul B. Krummel
  • L. Paul Steele
  • Paul J. Fraser
  • Shanlan Li
  • Sunyoung Park
  • Stefan Reimann
  • Martin K. Vollmer
  • Chris Lunder
  • Ove Hermansen
  • Norbert Schmidbauer
  • Michela Maione
  • Jgor Arduini
  • Dickon Young
  • Peter G. Simmonds
Show all

Summary, in English

We infer global and regional emissions of five of the most abundant hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) using atmospheric measurements from the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment and the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan, networks. We find that the total CO2-equivalent emissions of the five HFCs from countries that are required to provide detailed, annual reports to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) increased from 198 (175-221) Tg-CO2-eq·y-1 in 2007 to 275 (246-304) Tg-CO2-eq·y-1 in 2012. These global warming potential-weighted aggregated emissions agree well with those reported to the UNFCCC throughout this period and indicate that the gap between reported emissions and global HFC emissions derived from atmospheric trends is almost entirely due to emissions from nonreporting countries. However, our measurement-based estimates of individual HFC species suggest that emissions, from reporting countries, of the most abundant HFC, HFC-134a, were only 79% (63-95%) of the UNFCCC inventory total, while other HFC emissions were significantly greater than the reported values. These results suggest that there are inaccuracies in the reporting methods for individual HFCs, which appear to cancel when aggregated together.

Publishing year

2015-05-12

Language

English

Pages

5927-5931

Publication/Series

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Volume

112

Issue

19

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

National Academy of Sciences

Keywords

  • Climate change
  • Halocarbons
  • Radiative forcing

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0027-8424