Addressing Science and Policy Needs with Community Emissions Efforts

We present community-driven emissions efforts within the Global Emissions InitiAtive (GEIA, http://www.geiacenter.org/), a joint IGAC/iLEAPS/AIMES initiative of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. Since 1990, GEIA has served as a forum for the exchange of expertise and information on emissions. GEIA’s mission is to quantify anthropogenic emissions and natural exchanges of trace gases and aerosols, and to facilitate the use of this information by the research, assessment, and policy communities. GEIA supports a worldwide network of about 1300 developers and users in international scientific projects, providing a solid scientific foundation for atmospheric chemistry research. Moving forward, GEIA is broadening its role to help serve the emissions needs of the research, assessment, regulatory, operational, and policy communities. GEIA intends to demonstrate the potential for improving emission information by promoting the interoperability of datasets and tools and by making use of near-real-time observations. As a step toward these goals, GEIA is being linked with ECCAD (Emissions of chemical Compounds & Compilation of Ancillary Data, http://eccad.sedoo.fr/) and CIERA (Community Initiative for Emissions Research & Applications, http://ciera-air.org/). ECCAD is GEIA’s new interactive emissions data portal, providing consistent access to emission inventories and ancillary data with easy-to-use tools for analysis and visualization. CIERA is a GEIA community project to develop interoperability in emissions datasets and tools and to support evaluations of inventories. GEIA is also implementing new approaches to communicate emissions information and to connect scientific and regulatory emissions efforts. We invite the ESIP community to join the GEIA network and build partnerships with GEIA to advance emissions knowledge for the future.