The potential of a constellation of low earth orbit satellite imagers to monitor worldwide fossil fuel CO emissions from large cities and point sources.

Background: Satellite imagery will offer unparalleled global spatial coverage at high-resolution for long term cost-effective monitoring of CO concentration plumes generated by emission hotspots. CO emissions can then be estimated from the magnitude of these plumes. In this paper, we assimilate pseudo-observations in a global atmospheric inversion system to assess the performance of a constellation of one to four sun-synchronous low-Earth orbit (LEO) imagers to monitor anthropogenic CO emissions.