Core component of ITMS demonstrator published

 A core component of the ITMS demonstrator for estimating German methane emissions developed by DWD is now available as open-source software.
 

A demonstrator for estimating German methane emissions has been developed as part of the Integrated Greenhouse Gas Monitoring System for Germany (ITMS). It consists of many components built around two core steps. First, the transport of methane from emission sources to observation sites is simulated using the open-source numerical weather prediction model ICON. The model output is compared to observations and a correction to initially assumed emissions is computed. This second step relies on the Dynamic Uncertainty Bayesian Flux Inversion (DUBFI) software, which is now also publicly available.

DUBFI computes the most likely emissions based on tens of thousands of observations. To estimate which observations, agree with the emissions, the model uncertainty must be considered. DUBFI relies on a meteorological ensemble as it is used in numerical weather prediction to quantify the reliability of the simulation. For the first version of the demonstrator, it was shown that this method improves the precision of the emission estimates (Bruch et al., 2025).

DUBFI is a research-oriented software module that can be used to test and compare different methods of computing the model uncertainty. It introduces a framework for working with large matrices on high-performance computers and allows researchers to use model uncertainties that are dynamically updated along with the estimated emissions. Further details are described in the scientific documentation included in the software package.

With ICON and DUBFI, two main parts of the ITMS demonstrator are now open-source software, which may boost further scientific exchange.  Further tools are required to prepare input data, orchestrate the simulations, and convert the output to emission estimates. The modular design with components like DUBFI helps making the software robust and reusable.

 

Link DUBFI: https://gitlab.dkrz.de/itms/itms-m/dubfi

Scientific documentation: https://itms.gitlab-pages.dkrz.de/itms-m/dubfi/scidoc/introduction.html

Reference: Bruch, V., Rösch, T., Jiménez de la Cuesta Otero, D., Ellerhoff, B.,  Mamtimin, B., Becker, N., Blechschmidt, A.-M., Förstner, J., and  Kaiser-Weiss, A. K.: German methane fluxes in 2021 estimated with an  ensemble-enhanced scaling inversion based on the ICON–ART model,  EGUsphere [preprint],  https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-1464,  2025.