MEMO² as a collaborative project is involved in and also organising several measurement campaigns. The two main campaigns within MEMO² are the COMET (2018) and the ROMEO (2019) campaign, both with international teams of 40 and more participants.

ROMEO – ROmanian Methane Emissions from Oil & gas is a campaign executed in August and October 2019 in Romania. According to UNFCCC statistics, Romania is one of the European countries that reported highest emissions of CH₄ from the oil and gas sector to the atmosphere, in particular related to CH₄ production and end use. However, the estimates reported by Romania are derived using non-country-specific emission factors, and there are only very few observations which investigate whether the reported emissions are realistic. Such measurements will be provided by ROMEO, and they will result in a better experimental quantification of CH₄ emissions from the oil and gas sector in Romania and can help in devising emission mitigation strategies. This is an important issue, not only in this region but globally. If we want the Paris Agreement to succeed and reduction policies being realistic, we urgently need a much better knowledge and much more accurate budgets combining bottom-up and top-down quantification (Nisbet et al. 2019), which is the main goal of our joint campaign in Romania: contributing to those quantifications by not only inventory statistics but quantification on a national and local scale. You can follow the campaign on our ROMEO wiki and also by the blogs. We also present the campaign and its objectives in the video below.

Want to read more about measurements in Romania?

https://www.desmog.com/2021/08/25/methane-leaking-oil-gas-romania-europe/

CoMet – CoMet was a mission to collect (active and passive) remote sensing and in-situ data from aircraft in order to gain new knowledge on the distribution and temporal variation of the two most important anthropogenic greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane. MEMO² was involved by ground based measurements, which were mostly focused on mine shafts and observation of methane concentration close to these facilities. The combined results will help to better understand the global carbon cycle, local methane emissions and its influence on climate. The campaign, using the German research aircraft HALO and small Cessna aircraft took place in May / June 2018 in  the Upper Silesia Region in Poland. As a mining region, the Silesia Region (mostly situated in a west-south Poland) is considered as one of the biggest European emission sources of CH₄. First results have been shown at the EGU 2019. Interested in the CoMet data base?

Website: https://data.icos-cp.eu/portal/#{%22route%22:%22metadata%22,%22id%22:%224YLOpOtT0keMUckH1MrhxZZW%22}
PID: https://meta.icos-cp.eu/objects/4YLOpOtT0keMUckH1MrhxZZW
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18160/3k6z-4h73

This video gives an impression about activities during the campaign: