Guest speaker Prof. Dr. Jia Chen, Technical University of Munich, on novel methods she uses in her research to detect and quantify air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions in stands.

"Novel methods for quantifying greenhouse gases and air pollutants in cities"

Speaker: Prof. Jia Chen, Environmental Sensing and Modeling at Technical University of Munich

Date: April 5, 2022, 11-12 am
Place: Zoom

Moderation:  Prof. Barabara Sturm, Scientific Director at Leibniz ATB

Abstract

As more than 70% of fossil fuel-based carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted in urban areas, urban greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions play a crucial role in achieving the emission reduction goals. In addition, air pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides (NOX), and particulate matter (PM) adversely affect urban air quality and are harmful to human health. In this talk, I will present new observational methods and modelling approaches to address two of the most urgent challenges of our time: climate change and air pollution.

I will present a novel measurement method (Differential Column Measurements, Chen et al. 2016) and MUCCnet, the world’s first permanent urban GHG monitoring sensor network using this method (Dietrich et al. 2021). By combining the measured data with newly developed modelling methods based on computational fluid dynamics (Toja-Silva et al. 2017), machine learning (Gensheimer et al. 2022), and Bayesian inversion (Jones et al. 2021), we have been able to monitor the GHG emissions and sinks, and reveal unknown emission sources (Chen et al. 2020) at different spatial scales.

Furthermore, I will talk about our smart air quality network, consisting of 50 self-developed sensor systems, and our study on the response of air pollutants to emission changes in German cities (Balamurugan et al. 2021). Finally, I will discuss the possibility for global upscaling of my methods using satellite measurements (Shekhar et al. 2020).

Participate (via Zoom)