EMPIR climate project holds successful workshops and prepares for future report

Helping to reliably monitor volatile organic compounds in our atmosphere

The project

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are precursors of ozone and aerosols, contributing directly and indirectly to radiative forcing and thus to climate change. Therefore, identifying their atmospheric trends are vital to understanding climate change.

At EURAMET, the EMPIR project Metrology for climate relevant volatile organic compounds (19ENV06, MetClimVOC) is working to improve the comparability of monitoring VOC data, by developing new traceable reference gas mixtures, and improving sampling and analytical methods. The project consortium hopes to help air monitoring networks with reliably assessing air quality trends, something that will in turn enable policy makers to put effective climate change measures in place.

Project holds first workshop

In October 2021, the project held its first ever (online) stakeholder workshop. The event aimed to address challenges associated with obtaining accurate and comparable VOC measurements for terpenes, oxy-VOCs and halogenated VOCs.

The workshop managed to successfully bring together the remote sensing, ground-based and in-situ monitoring communities, to share uncertainty estimation issues and other metrological aspects. Importantly, the workshop demonstrated a clear willingness from all three communities to maintain dynamic communication and collaboration – to fine-tune the synergies needed to improve the quality and traceability of VOC observations to the International System of Units (the SI).

Participating in the publication of an Ozone Assessment Report

The Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report (TOAR) aims to provide the research community with an up-to-date scientific view of the tropospheric ozone’s (also referred to as our ground-level or surface-level ozone layer) global distribution and trends that are relevant to climate atmospheric models.

Since February 2020, TOAR entered its second phase (TOAR II), preparing to launch an updated tropospheric ozone assessment. The EMPIR project ‘MetClimVOC’ The EMPIR project is actively contributing to the second phase of the report with its active participation in the second phase of the report, that is sponsored by the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC). During this reporting period, several discussions have been taking place, with a view to define the project’s input more clearly. It has been decided that ‘MetClimVOC’ will contribute with a publication on the topic, ‘Towards a high-quality in-situ observation network for VOCs in Europe’ – planned for completion towards the end of 2023.

Workshop at International Metrology Conference

The project consortium recently ran a Climate Workshop at CIM 2023. This popular session was fully pre-booked, with all the seats taken. During the workshop, the main results of the project were shared, such as improvements on the preparation of VOC reference gas mixtures, on sampling and analytical methods, on spectral data determination and different field comparisons (using the above-mentioned improvements) were shown. A special emphasis was put on the SI-traceability and uncertainty calculation. Furthermore, two round-tables allowed discussions about left challenges and long-term cooperation between the metrology community and the air monitoring networks.

This EMPIR project is co-funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the EMPIR Participating States.

Want to hear more about EURAMET?