The CO 2 human emissions (CHE) project: first steps towards a European Operational capacity to monitor anthropogenic CO 2 emissions

The Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is a binding international treaty signed by 196 nations to limit their greenhouse gas emissions through ever-reducing Nationally Determined Contributions and a system of 5-yearly Global Stocktakes in an Enhanced Transparency Framework. To support this process, the European Commission initiated the design and development of a new Copernicus service element that will use Earth observations mainly to monitor anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions. The CO 2 Human Emissions (CHE) project has been successfully coordinating efforts of its 22 consortium partners, to advance the development of a European CO 2 monitoring and verification support (CO2MVS) capacity for anthropogenic CO 2 emissions. Several project achievements are presented and discussed here as examples. The CHE project has developed an enhanced capability to produce global, regional and local CO 2 simulations, with a focus on the representation of anthropogenic sources. The project has achieved advances towards a CO 2 global inversion capability at high resolution to connect atmospheric concentrations to surface emissions. CHE has also demonstrated the use of Earth observations (satellite and ground-based) as well as proxy data for human activity to constrain uncertainties and to enhance the timeliness of CO 2 monitoring. High-resolution global simulations (at 9 km) covering the whole of 2015 (labelled CHE nature runs) fed regional and local simulations over Europe (at 5 km and 1 km resolution) and supported the generation of synthetic satellite observations simulating the contribution of a future dedicated Copernicus CO 2 Monitoring Mission (CO2M).