Webinar Series on Urban Greenhouse Gas Monitoring - Using Eddy Covariance Flux Observations for Source-Specific Quantification of Neighborhood-Scale Urban CO2 Emissions

Webinar date: 6/10/2026
Webinar time: 16:00-17:30 CEST | 10:00 -11:30 EDT
Speaker: Sam Murphy, PhD Candidate, Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at Pennsylvania State University

Speaker bio: 

Sam Murphy is a PhD candidate working under Dr. Ken Davis in the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at Penn State. Sam’s dissertation work focuses on understanding the sources and sinks of CO2 in the urban environment using eddy covariance flux measurements. She has used these measurements to evaluate both anthropogenic and ecosystem CO2 flux models at high spatial and temporal resolutions in an urban domain.

Overview of the topic: 

Eddy Covariance (EC) flux measurements provide direct, continuous observations of local-scale urban greenhouse gas emissions. One challenge for EC measurements of CO2, in particular, is separating the biological and anthropogenic flux signals arising from the complex mixture of sources and sinks within the flux footprint of an urban tower. During this seminar, I will share results from applying a method to separate these two signals at an urban flux tower near downtown Indianapolis, IN. Using these observed anthropogenic fluxes, I will present an assessment of a high-resolution CO2 emissions inventory (Hestia) at a neighborhood scale as well as an evaluation of long-term trends in CO2 emissions over a 5-year measurement period.