Monitoring carbon dioxide emissions of urban areas has become a necessity for sustainable urban planning and climate change mitigation. The current emission inventories are based on bottom-up approaches that use fuel and electricity consumption statistics for determining carbon dioxide emissions. Such approaches present consistency issues, neglect the biogenic components of the urban carbon cycle (i.e. vegetation, soil) and have restricted spatial and temporal resolution.

The main goal of diFUME is to provide a robust methodology for mapping and monitoring the actual urban carbon dioxide flux at optimum spatial and temporal scales, meaningful for urban design decisions. diFUME will develop, apply and evaluate independent models, capable to estimate all the different components of the urban carbon cycle (i.e. building emissions, traffic emissions, human metabolism, photosynthetic uptake, plant respiration, soil respiration). An innovative interdisciplinary methodology will be introduced, combining two cutting-edge technology tools, the Eddy Covariance (EC) and the latest advances in Earth Observation (EO).