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What Are the Different Measures of Mobility Telling Us About Surface Transportation CO 2 Emissions During the COVID‐19 Pandemic?
Author(s) -
Gensheimer Johannes,
Chen Jia,
Turner Alexander J.,
Shekhar Ankit,
Wenzel Adrian,
Keutsch Frank N.
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of geophysical research: atmospheres
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2169-8996
pISSN - 2169-897X
DOI - 10.1029/2021jd034664
Subject(s) - proxy (statistics) , work (physics) , observable , covid-19 , individual mobility , environmental science , pandemic , mobility model , h1n1 pandemic , trace (psycholinguistics) , co occurrence , econometrics , computer science , meteorology , geography , statistics , mathematics , telecommunications , engineering , physics , medicine , disease , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty) , mechanical engineering , linguistics , philosophy , quantum mechanics , machine learning , artificial intelligence
The COVID‐19 pandemic led to widespread reductions in mobility and induced observable changes in atmospheric emissions. Recent work has employed novel mobility data sets as a proxy for trace gas emissions from traffic by scaling CO 2 emissions linearly with those near‐real‐time mobility data. Yet, there has been little work evaluating these emission numbers. Here, we systematically compare these mobility data sets to traffic data from local governments in seven diverse urban and national/state regions to characterize the magnitude of errors that result from using the mobility data. We observe differences in excess of 60% between these mobility data sets and local traffic data. We could not find a general functional relationship between the mobility data and traffic flow over all the regions and observe higher deviations from using such general relationships than the original data. Finally, we give an overview of the potential errors that come from estimating CO 2 emissions using (mobility or traffic) activity data. Future work should be cautious while using these mobility metrics for emission estimates.