Atmospheric trace gas measurements of greenhouse gases are critical in their precision and accuracy. In the past 5 years, atmospheric measurement and gas metrology communities have turned their attention to possible surface effects due to pressure and temperature variations during a standard cylinder's lifetime. This study concentrates on this issue by introducing newly built small volume aluminum and steel cylinders which enable the investigation of trace gases and their affinity for adsorption/desorption on various surfaces over a set of temperature and pressure ranges. The presented experiments 5 are designed to test the filling pressure dependencies up to 30 bar, and temperature dependencies from -10 • C up to 180 • C for these prototype cylinders. We present measurements of CO 2 , CH 4 , CO and H 2 O using a cavity ring down spectroscopy analyzer under these conditions. Moreover, we investigated CO 2 amount fractions using a novel quantum cascade laser spectrometer system enabling measurements at pressures as a low as 5 mbar. This extensive dataset revealed that until pressures as low as 150 mbar the enhancement in the amount fraction of CO 2 relative to its initial value (at 1200 mbar) is limited to 0.12 µmol mol −1 10 for the prototype aluminum cylinder. Up to 80 • C, the aluminum cylinder showed superior results and less response to varying temperature compared to the steel cylinder. For CO 2 , these changes were insignificant at 80 • C for the aluminum cylinder, whereas a 0.11 µmol mol −1 enhancement for the steel cylinder was observed. High temperature experiments showed that for both cylinders irreversible temperature effects occur especially above 130 • C.