MACRO-2018 - High-Resolution Simulation of CO and CO2 concentrations over German Metropolitan Areas for 2018 using WRF-Chem

Project: Metropolitan Area COx Record of Germany - This project investigates CO2 and CO dispersion, focusing on German metropolitan areas. Its aim is to provide a high-quality, high-resolution, long-term dataset of CO2 and CO concentrations and meteorology as a basis for various research applications. Already existing applications of this data include the optimization of urban sensor networks for CO2 monitoring and verification, the investigation of satellite observation strategies for CO2 and CO as well as comparisons with in-situ measurement data.

This project is part of the joint research project ITMS (https://www.itms-germany.de/) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) under reference number 01LK2102D
Summary: This dataset aims to provide high-quality, high-resolution, long-term information on CO2 and CO concentrations and meteorology in German metropolitan areas as a basis for various research applications. Already existing applications of this data include the optimization of urban sensor networks for CO2 monitoring and verification, the investigation of satellite observation strategies for CO2 and CO, as well as comparisons with in-situ measurement data.

This dataset contains 1km resolved CO2 and CO concentration fields as well as meteorology for the full year of 2018 in 5 metropolitan regions in Germany (Rhine-Neckar, Berlin, Rhine-Ruhr, Nuremberg, Munich). These domains are embedded in the Germany domain at 5km resolution and the Europe domain at 15km resolution. There are two simulations available using two different WRF-Chem v4.3.3 (https://github.com/wrf-model/WRF) configurations: One using Mellor-Yamada-Janjic as Boundary Layer scheme as well as Monin-Obukhov-Janjic as Surface Layer scheme and the other using Yonsei University as Boundary Layer scheme as well as MM5 as Surface Layer scheme.

High resolution anthropogenic emission data as input for the model was prepared by TNO, the Netherlands following the description in Super et al. (2020). Biogenic emissions are from two versions of VPRM. VPRM v1 was prepared by J. Marshall (personal communication) and VPRM v2 was prepared using pyVPRM (Glauch et al, 2025). Background concentration data is from CAMS (GHG short-term forecast; experiment ID gqpe — IFS cycle CY43R1; Diamantakis and Agusti-Panareda, 2017, and Agusti-Panareda et al., 2017). Preparatory sensitivity studies were published in Pilz et al. 2026.

More information and easy access to another version of this data can be found at https://atmo-iup-uhei.github.io/macro-2018/