Mesoscale Network for Monitoring Greenhouse Gas and Pollutant Emissions

• Applicant: Professorin Dr.-Ing. Jia Chen
• Subject Area: Atmospheric Science ; Measurement Systems
• Term: from 2019 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 419317138

It is evident that the present global warming is due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Hence, monitoring and reducing emissions of CO2 and CH4 is essential. Nowadays, most cities rely on bottom-up methods to calculate total emissions. Since these estimates are not based on direct measurements, they can have large uncertainties and are not able to identify and localize unknown emission sources.With this project my group and I will build a mesoscale monitoring network to measure CO2, CH4, CO, NO2, and O3 concentrations using the novel technique of differential column measurements. This method captures the difference in the column amounts downwind and upwind of the city, and therefore directly represents the particle mass loading within an urban domain.This method will allow us to accurately measure GHG emission rates for urban areas over time, and will also yield information about the internal generation and redistribution. We will answer key questions such as: What is the real, measured trend of CO2, CH4 and NO2 emissions in Munich over several years? Where are the emission hotspots? How accurate are the bottom-up estimates? How effective are emission reduction policies, e.g. district heating, passive housing, smart grid, green mobility, and green urban infrastructure? Are further emission mitigation measures necessary, especially for CH4?To this end, my group will establish a fully automated network system and create a data-modeling framework for differential column measurements, based on methods such as STILT (Stochastic Time-Inverted Lagrangian Transport) and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics). This modeling framework will deliver best strategies for designing city mesoscale monitoring networks, provide city and local source emission numbers, and finally help to reliably quantify and assess the effectiveness of emission reduction policies. The proposed network will serve as a prototype system to study and answer various network design questions. It will be a unique pilot project worldwide, the results of which can subsequently be transferred to other cities.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Major Instrumentation: Fourier Transform Spectrometer
• Instrumentation Group: 1830 Fourier-Transform-IR-Spektrometer