Development of the United States GReenhouse Gas and Air Pollutants Emissions System (GRA ² PES)

Abstract In the U.S., emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants are often developed independently. Here, we describe the GR eenhouse gas A nd A ir P ollutants E missions S ystem (GRA 2 PES), which provides gridded emissions of fossil‐fuel carbon dioxide (ffCO 2 ) and 93 air quality (AQ) species for 17 combustion and non‐combustion sectors at 4 km × 4 km spatial resolution across the contiguous US. We find that the AQ emissions most spatially correlated with ffCO 2 are nitrogen oxides (NO x , ρ = 0.67), followed by sulfur dioxide (SO 2 , ρ = 0.51), carbon monoxide (CO, ρ = 0.44), and fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 , ρ = 0.38). We evaluate GRA 2 PES ffCO 2 emissions with an ensemble of publicly available regional and global inventories at national (Normalized Mean Bias (NMB) = +1.4%), state (NMB = +1.5%, R 2 = 0.98), and urban (NMB = +11.5%, R 2 = 0.97) scales. Nationally, the differences of publicly available inventories from the ensemble average range from −10.0% to +5.7%, and consistency diverges at state and urban scales. We simulate GRA 2 PES ffCO 2 in a particle dispersion model and compare to measurements of radiocarbon ( 14 C)‐derived ffCO 2 collected in Los Angeles (August 2021), with results suggesting that GRA 2 PES ffCO 2 may be low by 19% for this city, but well within model‐observation differences for other publicly available inventories (−43% to +94%). GRA 2 PES AQ/ffCO 2 ratios converted to concentration space generally agree with field observations (NMB = +4%, log R 2 = 0.90). Lastly, we present a method by which to utilize GRA 2 PES to derive AQ emission fluxes from ffCO 2 emissions.