Application of portable FTIR spectrometers for detecting greenhouse gas emissions of the major city Berlin

Abstract

Abstract. Five portable Bruker EM27/SUN FTIR (Fourier transform infrared) spectrometers have been used for the accurate and precise observation of column-averaged abundances of CO2 and CH4 around the major city Berlin. In the work by Frey et al. (2015), a calibration procedure is developed and applied to the set of spectrometers used for the Berlin campaign. Here, we describe the observational setup of the campaign and aspects of the data analysis, and we present the recorded time series of XCH4 and XCO2. We demonstrate that the CO2 emissions of Berlin can be clearly identified in the observations. A simple dispersion model is applied which indicates a total strength of the Berlin source of about 0.8 t CO2 s−1. In the Supplement of this work, we provide the measured data set and auxiliary data. We hope that the model community will exploit this unique data set for state-of-the art inversion studies of CO2 and CH4 sources in the Berlin area.

Analysis of the potential of near-ground measurements of CO<sub>2</sub> and CH<sub>4</sub> in London, UK, for the monitoring of city-scale emissions using an atmospheric transport model

“…This challenge may be addressed using networks with different types of urban measurements (e.g. integrated column measurements, Hase et al, 2015), or averaging data from sufficiently dense sampling to obtain information about the spatial scales relevant to the model. Several conceptual improvements of the inversion methodology could also support the exploitation of urban measurements and to determine where, under which conditions and/or how the large-scale signal can be filtered from the measurements so that it could be well represented by the kilometre-scale models.…”

Comparison of XCO abundances from the Total Carbon Column Observing Network and the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change measured in Karlsruhe

“…This is a numerical chemistry and climate simulation system that includes submodels describing tropospheric and middleatmospheric processes and their interaction with oceans, land, and human influences (Jöckel et al, 2006). It uses the second version of the Modular Earth Submodel System (MESSy2) to link multi-institutional computer codes (Jöckel et al, 2010).…”

“…For the analysis of spectra recorded in the MIR, we use the retrieval algorithm PROFFIT (Hase et al, 2004), which is widely used within NDACC and for analyses of lowresolution spectra as recorded with EM27/SUN spectrometers (Bruker Optics GmbH, Germany; Gisi et al, 2012;Hase et al, 2015;Frey et al, 2015; Klappenbach et al, Figure 1. A priori VMR profiles used for the TCCON retrieval of NIR spectra (daily varying profile) and for the NDACC retrieval of MIR spectra (one fixed profile).…”

Addition of a channel for XCO observations to a portable FTIR spectrometer for greenhouse gas measurements

“…The main difference is that the spectral resolution of the portable spectrometer is much lower: it provides double-sided interferograms with a maximum optical path difference (OPDmax) of 1.8 cm, while the TCCON applies 45 cm or higher OPDmax. An instructive example of application is provided by Hase et al (2015), where a set of five EM27/SUN spectrometers has been used for detecting the carbon-dioxide-enriched plume generated by the major city Berlin. The current EM27/SUN spectrometer offers a spectral coverage of about 5500-11 000 cm −1 , slightly broader than the 6000-11 000 cm −1 coverage used for the prototype described by Gisi et al (2012).…”