Here is a short post on how I/this project contributed to the paper “Rapid increase in dichloromethane emissions from China inferred through atmospheric observations” by An et al. in Nature Communications, and a bit on the background on the project. You can access the open access article here.
Minde, who led the work, was a visiting student in the Atmospheric Chemistry Research Group in Bristol from Peking University. His main aim was to learn about inverse modelling, and wanted to focus on chloromethanes. Minde had access to data from the CMA network in China – a network of measurement stations measuring a whole host of ozone depleting substances (ODSs). This data isn’t open, and so it was great to collaborate and use a measurement set that can “see” emissions from all over China.
We chose to look at dichloromethane in the beginning because we didn’t have a good grasp on what was going on within China and there had been some interesting recent global studies on rising emissions of short-lived ODSs. Minde did a great job of learning how to do inverse modelling, and applying it to dichloromethane emissions from China. What I really liked about this work was that it was complemented with a bottom-up study to learn more about sector based emissions, as this is a limitation of the top-down approach to substances like dichloromethane. This was a really Bristol.
Nearly all of the work was completed by the time this fellowship began, but there was a bit of time spent on the revisions, which weren’t very extensive. The big thing moving forward is that a great collaboration has been established, which will hopefully allow more important emissions estimates within China to be made.
