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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Interdisciplinary Climate Studies
Volume 12 - 2024 |
doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2024.1461656
This article is part of the Research Topic Urban Environments and Climate Change: Relationships and Impacts View all 5 articles
Zooming into Berlin: Tracking Street-Scale CO 2 Emissions based on High-resolution Traffic Modeling using Machine Learning
Provisionally accepted- Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools based on Machine learning (ML) have demonstrated their potential in modeling climate-related phenomena. However, their application to quantifying greenhouse gas emissions in cities remains under-researched. Here, we introduce a ML-based bottom-up framework to predict hourly CO 2 emissions from vehicular traffic at fine spatial resolution (30x30m). Using data-driven algorithms, traffic counts, spatio-temporal features, and meteorological data, our model predicted hourly traffic flow, average speed, and CO 2 emissions for passenger cars (PC) and heavy-duty trucks (HDT) at the street scale in Berlin. Even with limited traffic information, the model effectively generalized to new road segments. For PC, the Relative Mean Difference (RMD) was +16% on average. For HDT, RMD was 19% for traffic flow and 2.6% for average speed. We modeled seven years of hourly CO 2 emissions (2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020)(2021)(2022) and identified major highways as hotspots for PC emissions, with peak values reaching 1.639 kgCO 2 m -2 d -1 . We also analyzed the impact of COVID-19 lockdown and individual policy stringency on traffic CO 2 emissions. During the lockdown period (March 15 to June 1, 2020), weekend emissions dropped substantially by 25% (-18.3 tCO 2 day -1 ), with stay-at-home requirements, workplace closures, and school closures contributing significantly to this reduction. The continuation of these measures resulted in sustained reductions in traffic flow and CO 2 emissions throughout 2020 and 2022.These results highlight the effectiveness of ML models in quantifying vehicle traffic CO 2 emissions at a high spatial resolution. Our ML-based bottom-up approach offers a useful tool for urban climate research, especially in areas lacking detailed CO 2 emissions data.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, machine learning, Carbon accounting, Urban climate, COVID-19
Received: 08 Jul 2024; Accepted: 18 Dec 2024.
Copyright: © 2024 Anjos and Meier. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Max Anjos, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
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