MEMO2 created impact on different levels such as personal levels for the ESRs (career perspective and employability), local and network training levels and scientific level.
ESRs were introduced to a highly interdisciplinary training program and get acquainted with various technologies to identify CH4 emissions in the atmosphere (WP1), attribute emissions to various source categories (WP2) and quantify such emissions from the local to the European scale (WP3). All ESRs were involved in secondments to other project partners, which increased their professional knowledge, broadened their network and complementary skills. Blogging on their secondments on the project website (
https://h2020-memo2.eu/category/blog/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)) enhanced both their writing skills and the visibility of the project towards the public.
On a scientific level, MEMO2 created impact as a project itself but also by each individual ESR project, i.a. by the high number of available new data sets and their quality. Isotopic data were carefully compared and linked them to common scale, produced detailed error estimations for parts of the modelling and prepared guidelines for harmonised measurements. Results lead to recommendations on sampling methodologies, strategies, and data evaluation.
Emission errors were quantified, and simulations demonstrate e.g. that high-frequency measurements of 13C and D are important to better constrain CH4 emission estimates. They clearly show the need of a precision of at least 1 ‰ for D analyses and 0.05 ‰ for 13C analyses to discriminate methane sources at most ICOS sites, which form the backbone of the European greenhouse gas monitoring infrastructure.
The MEMO2 activities allowed in-depth studies of CH4 emissions from various sources in Europe by using different platforms and methodologies. Since there is no or hardly any such data, MEMO2 made a significant contribution to improving the data situation and foster a better understanding of CH4 emissions from these sources. In this context particularly, the joint measurement campaigns have a high impact as they offered unique opportunities to not only collect data, but also to directly compare sampling and evaluation methodologies.
MEMO2 fosters the idea of open access as data, collected on the ICOS data portal, will be publicly available soon after the project has ended. The isotopic characterization of methane sources in Europe performed within MEMO2 is already gathered into an openly available database (Menoud et al. 2020,
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3975543(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)). The results represent a substantial new contribution to the existing isotope datasets and will lead to the development or improvement of mitigation strategies and recommendations to decrease CH4 emissions from distinct sources.
In conclusion based on results and general output, MEMO2 was a highly successful project. Not only from our perspective, but also in the perspective of the Research Executive Agency (REA), which declared MEMO2 official a “Success Story”.
