Overview

The Global Emissions Inventory Activity (GEIA) was created in 1990 as an activity of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP) . Since 1990 the GEIA community has been developing and distributing inventories of global gas and aerosol emissions from natural and anthropogenic sources. The GEIA network includes almost 625 people around the globe. Check out GEIA history for more details on the development of GEIA.

In 2004 GEIA began officially expanding to better serve the greater global climate change science and assessment communities.

See the International IGBP Newsletter #57 for more details.

GEIA's new role within the IGBP -- providing the critical databases that link dynamic interactions between human societies and their environment -- is discussed in more detail here.

New, expanded GEIA goals and operations plus priorities for 2007, prepared by the Joint GEIA/ACCENT Steering Committee during the GEIA 2006 Open Conference, along with key findings of the 2006 GEIA Conference are now available.

GEIA Goals and Operations

GEIA brings together people, analyses, data, and tools to:

• Quantify the anthropogenic emissions and natural exchanges of trace gases and aerosols that drive earth system changes and
• Facilitate use of this information by the research, assessment and policy communities.

GEIA’s goals are accomplished through:

• Scientific conferences, workshops, and schools; ongoing dialogue and outreach; and enhanced use of the GEIA network and web site for communication, coordination, and collaboration
• Data portal including global and regional datasets, retaining integrity and authorship of each set, and tools for facilitating data intercomparisons
• Living reviews of available emissions data and periodic synthesis assessments
• Projects proposed by the scientific community and endorsed by GEIA

Mission

GEIA's expanded mission covers several themes -

1. New Inventories: incorporate new,quality- assured datasets,such as regional/global inventories and time-dependent inventories (e.g.historical and future),that will follow the rapid evolution and development of chemistry-transport and Earth System models used for long simulations.
2. Inter-comparisons and Evaluations:i dentify the main uncertainties and problems remaining in the inventories,so as to improve emission and depo- sition estimates.
3. Prioritise Observations: identify and prioritise the measurements needed to improve emission and deposition estimates,in collaboration with other IGBP projects.
4. Databases of Driving Variables: provide the evaluation and compilation of emission factors, emission algorithms and other driving variables used for emission estimation.This will improve consistency between inventories,and provide recommendations on the use of variables which could help in developing new inventories (e.g. gridded population data,fire pixels,burned scars, leaf area index).
5. Temporal Variations: improve predictions of short-term (i.e.diurnal,weekly,seasonal)emission variations,to allow detailed analysis at the local or regional scale,and to allow more detailed analy- sis of global datasets.
6. Chemical Exchange Models: develop stand- alone models for evaluating parameterisations of chemical-exchange processes and incorporate these into chemistry-transport and Earth System models.This activity will (in collaboration with other IGBP projects)help couple mechanistic or comprehensive emission models.
7. Validation Using Observations and Global/ Regional Chemistry-transport Models: develop and apply (in collaboration with scientists perform- ing measurements)forward and inverse model- ling methods,using observations from surface networks,in-situ (aircraft or balloon)or satellite observations.

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Special thanks to the following organizations:

• National Science Foundation for providing ongoing support for the GEIA Center.
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration for providing funding to develop the GEIA Web site.
• University of Michigan for hosting the GEIA Web site.
• National Center for Atmospheric Research for providing the original ftp site for GEIA inventories.