Metrology for stable isotope reference standards
New capabilities to identify source of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide will improve emissions monitoring
Immediate action is required to prevent irreversible changes to the Earth’s climate due to greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers need to be able to discriminate man-made from natural emissions in the atmosphere, to provide governments with accurate emissions inventory data and verify progress towards emissions reduction targets. However, this cannot be achieved with the existing measurement infrastructure.
This project has developed a new infrastructure including methods and instrumentation to underpin measurements of stable isotopes of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, two major greenhouse gases, which enable their origin to be identified. This will be instrumental in providing more accurate, comparable data to separate various man-made sources of greenhouse gas emissions from each other, as well as from natural sources. This will enable governments to develop accurate emissions inventories and models to comply with legislation, and inform new policy and better abatement strategies to help prevent dangerous climate change.
EMPIR project 19ENV05 STELLAR builds on this work.
Atmospheric Measurement Techniques
Spectrochimica Acta Part B: Atomic Spectroscopy
Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry
Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry
Spectrochimica Acta Part B: Atomic Spectroscopy
Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry
Participating EURAMET NMIs and DIs
DFM (Denmark)
INRIM (Italy)
MIKES (Finland)
NPL (United Kingdom)
PTB (Germany)
UME (Türkiye)
Other Participants
Al Air Liquide España, S.A. (Spain)
Eidgenoessische Materialpruefungs- und Forschungsanstalt (Switzerland)
Institut Jožef Stefan (Slovenia)
Itä-Suomen yliopisto (Finland)
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der Wissenschaften e.V. (Germany)
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (Netherlands)
Information