The MESAP Software for the German Emission Inventory

Abstract

Emission reporting is a complex task. Large quantities of data have to be handled. They come from different sources and are communicated through a heterogeneous variety of means and tools. As a consequence they need a high degree of manual treatment which opens up the door for many types of errors. Since most of the reporting is done with Excel, the degree of data redundancy is high, each spreadsheet containing a copy of the original figures. Data flow, data processing and the calculations performed are rarely documented which makes it hard to verify the reported data. The German central system of emissions CSE was designed to achieve the five objectives of emission reporting: transparency, consistency, completeness, comparability and accuracy of the reported data. The requirements were to store time series with different time resolution, to quickly retrieve data and to easily create user defined views on the data. Finally the reporting was to be done using MS Excel format. CSE speeds up data processing and improves the documentation of data and calculation procedures. CSE offers a better management and accessibility of the time series data and allows even to open up this treasure via Internet. The data is well protected and documented in a central database. CSE gives the staff versatile analysis capabilities and lets them create reports in a well known fashion – still with Excel, but with a link to the database. The different steps from collecting new data up to publishing reports are automated as much as possible. CSE is built using the MESAP software technology, which enables the agency to profit from new developments and new functional modules at low cost.