Post by Patrick Aigner

I’m excited to share that my work on the Munich urban CO₂ sensor network has just been published 🎉 This project is the reason I returned to academia to pursue my PhD. It combines many of the things I enjoy most: sensor development, IoT and distributed systems, hands-on hardware, and data processing. The work sits at the intersection of atmospheric science, sensing, and applied engineering. We focus on a simple yet important question: how can we quantify urban CO₂ emissions to provide trustworthy data for local decision-making? To tackle this question, we developed the sensor network ACROPOLIS (Autonomous and Calibrated Rooftop Observatory for MetroPOLItan Sensing). Over the first 1.5 years of operation, the network collected more than 90 million CO₂ measurements across urban, suburban, and rural environments. It captured distinct seasonal and spatial variations in CO₂ concentrations across the metropolitan area of Munich. The open-source design establishes a practical blueprint for future deployments in other cities, aiming to strengthen emissions monitoring and urban climate policy. Grateful for the journey so far, and curious to see how these ideas evolve beyond this project. Huge thanks to an excellent team of co-authors: Jia Chen, Felix Böhm, Mali Chariot, Lukas Emmenegger, Lars F., Stuart Grange, Daniel Kühbacher, Klaus Kuerzinger, Olivier Laurent, Moritz Oliveira Makowski, Pascal Rubli, Adrian Schmitt, Adrian Wenzel And a big thank you to all collaborators and institutions who made this possible, especially the managers and technical staff who supported site access and long-term operation. #UrbanClimate #CO2 #IoT #OpenSource #OpenScience #AtmosphericScience #ClimatePolicy #SmartCities https://lnkd.in/d26AS2fF