CARES · City Air Remote Emission Sensing

The aim of CARES is to further develop remote emission sensing instruments, data handling and analysis such that it becomes a widespread means for the monitoring and enforcement of real-world vehicle emissions, leading to reduced emissions and improvements in air quality. To reach this goal, CARES will complement existing commercial remote emission sensing instruments with two other non-intrusive and contactless methods of measuring real-world vehicle emissions to greatly expand current measurement capabilities. We develop plume chasing instruments into easy to use tools for enforcement agents to detect high-emitters in free flowing traffic. We turn fast-response air quality sensors into roadside point samplers, adding particle mass, number and size to the remote emission sensing measurement capabilities. Furthermore, we speed up the data handling of all types of remote emission sensing instruments – existing commercial types as well as those further developed within CARES – to move them towards a real-time analysis of vehicle emission data; we merge the emissions data with vehicle technical data from national vehicle registers and relevant data from traffic and air quality management systems. Third, we eliminate today’s often very time consuming data analysis by providing a suite of open-source analytical functions for a first, quick analysis of remote emission sensing data. All our innovations aim to improve the user friendliness, to bring down costs by quicker and more automated operations, and to achieve a broader deployment potential of remote emission sensing. CARES will demonstrate these developments in three major, heavily air polluted cities in Europe identifying the best fit for the respective purpose. Finally, CARES will bring together researchers, remote emission sensing technology providers, local, regional and national authorities and many other stakeholders from Europe, China and the rest of the world, to maximize the project's exploitation potential.