An expert survey on chamber measurement techniques and approaches for calculation and quality control of methane fluxes

DOI

This data set contains the responses to an expert survey on chamber measurements of methane (CH4) fluxes from 36 participants working in 11 countries each of whom had at least one field season of experience in chamber measurements. The expert survey covered questions on demographic information, the research sites and research topics of the participants, their measurement setups, and their flux calculation methods. The survey, furthermore, contained an exercise on visual quality control in which the participants were asked to decide between keeping or discarding 12 chamber measurements or parts of them based on the behavior of the CH4, carbon dioxide (CO2), and water vapor (H2O) concentrations measured in the chamber over time and to explain their decisions. We calculated the CH4 fluxes based on a linear fit to the time periods chosen by the participants. The calculated CH4 fluxes as well as the raw chamber measurement data for this visual quality control are included in this data set. The survey results allow us to assess the similarities and the differences between the approaches to measure, process, and evaluate chamber CH4 fluxes used by the different flux experts. This knowledge can help at harmonizing chamber measurement methods for CH4 fluxes and thus at identifying and eliminating sources of uncertainty for data synthesis products which combine data sets processed by various researchers. A reassessment of chamber techniques becomes particularly important in the light of an increasing use of new multigas analyzers whose high-frequency and high-accuracy CH4 concentration measurements both open new possibilities and pose new challenges in the interpretation of chamber measurements.

The provided files contain the archived survey questions, demographic information on the survey participants, the participants' responses to the survey questions, photos of the participants' measurement setups, and the raw data of chamber measurements that were used in the visual quality control part of the survey. A detailed overview of the provided files, their content, variable abbreviations and units can be found in Jentzschetal2024_ExpertSurveyChamberCH4Fluxes_Metadata.pdf.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.971695
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.971695
Provenance
Creator Jentzsch, Katharina ORCID logo; van Delden, Lona; Fuchs, Matthias ORCID logo; Hall, Kathleen R; Treat, Claire C ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2025
Funding Reference European Research Council https://doi.org/10.13039/501100000781 Crossref Funder ID 851181 https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/851181 The role of non-growing season processes in the methane and nitrous oxide budgets in pristine northern ecosystems
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 12 data points
Discipline Earth System Research