New publication Designing urban CO2 sensor networks
Christopher Lüken-Winkels and team used synthetic simulation experiments to investigate how urban CO2 sensor networks should be designed to best quantify city-wide emissions. For the cities of Berlin and Munich, they tested how the number, quality and placement of in situ CO2 sensors affect the ability to recover assumed true emissions.
A particular strength of the study is that it explicitly accounts for different types of realistic uncertainty, including transport errors, limited sensor precision, background concentration errors and systematic measurement biases. This allows the network designs to be evaluated under conditions that closely resemble real-world deployments. The study shows that carefully designed networks can substantially improve emission estimates compared to randomly placed sensors. Mid- and high-cost sensors provide reliable constraints on total city emissions, while lower-accuracy sensors can lead to limited improvements or even degrade emission estimates. The results provide practical guidance for planning cost-effective urban CO2 monitoring networks before sensors are physically deployed.
This work is part of the project “Integriertes Treibhausgas Monitoring System” für Deutschland (ITMS), which aims at building an emission monitoring capacity to independently determine German national emissions.
Lüken-Winkels, C., Pilz, L., and Vardag, S. N.: Designing urban CO2 sensor networks under realistic uncertainties and biases: Results from synthetic studies in Berlin and Munich, Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, 14, 00118, 2026.