Unveiling the changes in urban atmospheric CO2 in the time of COVID-19 pandemic: A case study of Florence (Italy)

The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by global mobility restrictions and slowdown in manufacturing activities. Accordingly, cities experienced a significant decrease of CO emissions. In this study, continuous measurements of CO fluxes, atmospheric CO concentrations and ?C-CO values were performed in the historical center of Florence (Italy) before, during and after the almost two-month long national lockdown. The temporal trends of the analyzed parameters, combined with the variations in emitting source categories (from inventory data), evidenced a fast response of flux measurements to variations in the strength of the emitting sources. Similarly, the ?C-CO values recorded the change in the prevailing sources contributing to urban atmospheric CO, confirming the effectiveness of carbon isotopic data as geochemical tracers for identifying and quantifying the relative contributions of emitting sources. Although the direct impact of restriction measurements on CO concentrations was less clear due to seasonal trends and background fluctuations, an in-depth analysis of the daily local CO enhancement with respect to the background values revealed a progressive decrease throughout the lockdown phase at the end of the heating season (>10 ppm), followed by a net increase (ca. 5 ppm) with the resumption of traffic. Finally, the investigation of the shape of the frequency distribution of the analyzed variables revealed interesting aspects concerning the dynamics of the systems.