Process:
- Please read through the IG3IS Implementation Plan to find guidance on how to design your project
- Please carefully study the essential requirements for a IG3IS project to make sure that your project qualifies for one of the objectives
- Fill in the application letter and send it by email and by ordinary post (a signed paper version) to: Dr. Oksana Tarasova (OTarasova@wmo.int) Chief, AER/WMO (application letter on last page of this document)
- Your application will be considered by the IG3IS team and confirmation will be sent to you. Please kindly specify your contact details in the application
- As soon as you get a confirmation of acceptance (about 1 month after application is received in the WMO Secretariat or longer if additional considerations are needed) details will be requested by IG3IS staff in order to publicize your project on the IG3IS website
Requirements:
There are four key IG3IS objectives identified in the IG3IS Science Implementation Plan (section 3 “IG3IS Objectives”). The first objective is to support the reduction of uncertainty in national emission inventory reporting to the UNFCCC. Second, is to provide information to governments and businesses that will help locate and quantify previously unknown emission reduction opportunities such as fugitive methane emissions from industrial sources. Third, is to support subnational government entities such as cities and states that represent large GHG source regions (e.g., megacities) with actionable information on their GHG emissions at the needed spatial, temporal and sectoral resolution to evaluate and guide progress towards emission reduction goals. Fourth, and finally, is to support the Paris Agreement’s global stock take as governments and the UNFCCC define their requirements.
The requirements for projects promoting each of the objectives is outlined below. In order to increase the ease of coordinating this application with the Implementation Plan, the objective requirements are organized by the same section headings as seen in the IG3IS Implementation Plan. Before submitting your application, please study these carefully to ensure that your project qualifies.
Essential Characteristics Needed for an Objective #3 Project (sections 3.1 - 3.8)
Requirements Regarding Section 3.2 of the IG3IS Implementation Plan: User-based Information Requirements, Current Capabilities and Gaps
- Outline how you have integrated continuous communication with your local stakeholders, in order to create opportunities for “course-correcting.” This could include proof of meetings that occurred, changes in strategy that followed a discussion, etc.
- Provide proof that you have created and sustained an advisory group of stakeholders and pilot cities
- Prove that you have understood the information needs of stakeholders such as whole city emissions, trend analysis, space/time/sector quantification, sector specific analysis of emissions, co-benefits and trade-off with air quality inventories and biosphere exchange. Then, prove that you have evaluated the current availability of monitoring and modeling systems, and then identified the areas of knowledge, technique, or infrastructure that was insufficient to conduct the IG3IS analysis in order to meet these goals
- Identify the level of sophistication of the urban stakeholders’ needs and the complexity of the solution you will provide, using the figure below
Requirements Regarding Section 3.3 of the IG3IS Implementation Plan: Urban Typology
- Outline the information you gathered on the human-dominated dimensions of your city project site. This is including, but not limited to:
- Per capita energy use
- Urban density
- Age of infrastructure
- Dominant commercial sectors
- GDP
- etc.
- Outline how you have geophysically characterized your city project site. This is including, but not limited to:
- Topography
- Availability/proximity to water
- Climate
- Weather
- Classification as a plume or dome city
- etc.
Requirements Regarding Section 3.5 of the IG3IS Implementation Plan: Measurement Design
- Outline your choice in urban measurement and modeling techniques. This could include some of the following, but is not limited to:
- A network of in situ GHG sensors
- Co-located measurement of ancillary trace gases and isotopes
- Local meteorological information
- Fixed sites
- Mobile platforms
- Ratio approach
- Mass balance
- etc.
- Prove that you have taken effort to identify existing and known methodological challenges with techniques already deployed in the field, in order to avoid duplicating errors/problems
- Provide reasoning for your choice of technique based on the following criteria:
- Stakeholder needs
- GHGs targeted
- Urban typology
- Availability of equipment and expertise
- If used, provide the precision and frequency of your quasi-continuous in-situ measurements
- Describe how you assess the data quality of these measurements
- Prove that your instrumentation is calibrated to the same scales as outlined here: (WMO/GAW GGMT recommendations available at https://library.wmo.int/opac/doc_num.php?explnum_id=3074)
- If used, provide the frequency and time of day for sampling of your flask measurements
- If used, describe how you assess the quality of the data gathered from your lower-cost sensors, total column, and/or open-path sensor
- Provide the location, height and description of surrounds for each of your data collecting sites
- Describe how you determined the up-wind or background CO2 and other trace gas/isotope concentrations for your city project site
- Discuss how you will be gathering your meteorological information, and which meteorological information you will be gathering. This can come from existing meteorological stations, but if not, the following must be accounted for in some way:
- Wind speed
- Wind direction
- Boundary layer height
- etc.
Requirements Regarding Section 3.6 of the IG3IS Implementation Plan: Model Development
- Identify the type(s) atmospheric transport modeling used in your analysis. This could include, but is not limited to:
- Forward atmospheric transport modeling
- Backward atmospheric transport modeling
- Meso-scale transport modeling
- Lagrangian particle dispersion modeling
- Plume modeling
- Eddy modeling
- etc.
- For your atmospheric inversions, identify and describe the bottom-up data products and the atmospheric transport models you utilized
- If you found different results when comparing a bottom-up data set to a top-down data set, describe how you investigated the potential causes of this differentiation
- Discuss the potential biases and uncertainties associated with your modelling system. This could include, but is not limited to:
- Impact of the chosen atmospheric transport model: which includes the consideration of other types of models and an evaluation of the differences in assumptions and parameterizations between them
- Types of models include, but is not limited to: Lagrangian, Eulerian, large eddy simulation, computational fluid dynamics, etc.
- The robustness of different data assimilation approaches for atmospheric inversions
- Types of approaches include, but is not limited to: analytical Bayesian, variational Bayesian, Kalman filter, etc.
- If you utilize novel data streams used to create prior emission inventories
- For example: cell phone data, high-res. satellite imagery, biogenic flux models, local level demographic data, city/company reported emission inventories, point source information, etc.
- If you utilize novel inversion systems such as those without spatially explicit prior (bottomup) flux information, fossil fuel data assimilation systems (FFDAS), and multispecies inversions
- Prove that your records of your measurement and data analysis strategy is archived
- Observations, metadata, model code, and model outputs must be archived at one or more levels
- Raw observational and calibration data is designated level one, with higher levels for data that has been parsed into subsets designed for specific uses (e.g. different wind directions), and/or additional calculations such as enhancements over background or additional information (e.g. fossil CO2) calculated from initial observations
Requirements Regarding Section 3.7 of the IG3IS Implementation Plan: Existing Projects
- Specify if your project includes any of the following new and novel techniques for GHG observing systems which are currently under investigation. This is including, but not limited to:
- Dense low-cost in-situ sensor networks
- Open-path measurements in the horizontal and vertical
- Satellite observations - algorithms to transform existing remote-sensing data products to flux-related information
- Novel tracers and isotopes (14C, O2/CO2 ratios, CO, stable isotopes, COS, SIF, etc)
- Air quality tracers
- Specify if your project utilizes observations of GHG satellites. This is including, but not limited to:
- Japan’s Greenhouse Gas Observing Satellite (GOSAT)
- NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2)
- etc.
Requirements Regarding Section 3.8 of the IG3IS Implementation Plan: Capacity Building and Outreach
- Describe and prove how you have built local capacity through knowledge transfer and training in order to encourage the success of your project
- Prove how your project has linked to existing international standardization organizations such as the WMO Greenhouse Gas Measurement Techniques (GGMT)
Additional Essential Characteristics Needed for an Inverse Modeling (sections 6.2 & 6.5)
Requirements Regarding Section 6.2 of the IG3IS Implementation Plan: Development of inverse modelling techniques
- Verify that your inverse modelling method applies the Bayes theorem for quantifying uncertainties
Requirements Regarding Section 6.5 of the IG3IS Implementation Plan: First urban-scale experiments: demonstration of the approach
- Verify that your results can be supported by another inversion study/technique. This could be run by you, or come from the results of a project conducted by someone else
- Prove that you have conducted sensitivity experiments and uncertainty assessments with your inversion model