Webinar Series on Urban Greenhouse Gas Monitoring - Urban GHG monitoring in South America's largest city

Webinar date: 26/8/2026
Webinar time: 15:00-16:30 CEST
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Marco Aurélio de Menezes Franco 

Speaker bio: Prof. Dr. Marco Aurélio de Menezes Franco is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences, University of São Paulo. He holds a PhD in Physics from USP, with research experience at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany. His research focuses on greenhouse gases, atmospheric pollutants, aerosols, meteorology, and land-use interactions in tropical and urban environments. In São Paulo, he investigates how megacity emissions, urban structure, vegetation, and atmospheric processes influence greenhouse gas concentrations and fluxes, with emphasis on the role of urban areas in regional air quality degradation and climate change.

Overview of the topic: Cities are major contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions, yet continuous atmospheric measurements remain scarce, particularly in megacities of the Global South. In this seminar, I will present the METROCLIMA-MASP network, a pioneering urban greenhouse gas monitoring network established in the Metropolitan Area of São Paulo. The network combines measurements of CO₂, CH₄, CO, carbon isotopes, and CO₂ fluxes at strategically selected sites that represent contrasting urban, vegetated, and background conditions. The first results reveal how traffic emissions, vegetation, topography, biomass burning, and boundary-layer dynamics shape the spatial and temporal variability of greenhouse gases in the largest megacity of the Southern Hemisphere. METROCLIMA-MASP provides a unique scientific infrastructure for understanding urban emissions, evaluating inventories, investigating biosphere–atmosphere interactions, and supporting climate mitigation strategies at the metropolitan scale.