Disaggregation of national fossil fuel CO2 emissions using a global power plant database and DMSP nightlight data

National fossil fuel CO 2 emissions are often available in gridded form. Previous gridded inventories of fossil fuel CO 2 emissions were made by using population statistics as proxies for their spatial distribution. Presumed in the use of such statistics is correlation between human population and their activities. That assumption is valid at national and state levels. The correlation, however, gets weaker beyond those spatial scales. A better approach was necessary for high-resolution emission mapping. We have proposed a two-step scheme to disaggregate national CO 2 emissions and developed fossil fuel CO 2 emission gridded inventory for 1980-2007 [Oda and Maksyutov, 2010]. Power plant emissions were allocated to their location based on a published power plant database. Emissions from other sources were distributed using DMSP satellite-observed nightlight dataset. The resulting inventory showed good agreement with a US high-resolution inventory, however, it was constructed using a single radiance calibrated lights product from 1996-97, which until recently was only available product of its kind. Here, we developed a gridded emission inventory for the year 2006 using the 2006 radiance lights product which was recently processed by the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) of the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA). The 2006 radiance lights did not have saturated pixels and is well correlated with population data over major emitting countries. Due to the improvements in the 2006 radiance lights, source regions in suburb areas were well depicted and were much larger compared to the inventory constructed using the 1996-97 radiance calibrated lights data.