CHIOTTO – Continuous HIgh-precisiOn Tall Tower Observations of greenhouse gases – is a European Union-funded project which has as objective to build an infrastructure for the continuous monitoring of greenhouse gas concentrations across Europe above the surface layer using tall towers (~300m height). For this purpose a new analysis system for continuous atmospheric measurements was built and tested at Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany and was recently installed at a 300 m tower close to Bialystok, Poland (Lat 53°14'N, Long 23°01'E, Alt 180m), as part of the “CHIOTTO” tall tower network. Since July 2005 this system is measuring quasi-continuously the atmospheric concentration of CO₂, CH₄, CO, N₂O, SF₆ and the O₂/N₂ ratio as well as meteorological parameters (atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity; wind speed and direction) from 5 heights on the tower ranging from 5 to 300 m. The measurement devices are: an Oxzilla O₂ fuel cell analyzer, a LiCor 7000 NDIR CO₂ analyzer, an Agilent gas chromatograph (GC) with flame ionization detector (FID) and electronic capture detector (ECD) for CH₄, CO, N₂O, SF₆. The challenge was to build a reliable automatic system which can run continuously with very little maintenance and to fulfill at the same time the high precision requirements for all the measured species prescribed by the CHIOTTO project goals. The high temporal resolution achieved will capture short term events and diurnal variability. In addition, the system is planned to run for at least several years in order to observe long-term trends as well. We describe the technical setup of the measurement system, the region of influence of the station and present the first months of data if available: correlations between species, observed short term variability patterns and their relation to meteorology and air parcel paths.