Abstract. A critical issue for the long-term monitoring of atmospheric trace gases is precision and accuracy of the measurement systems employed. To ensure the best preparation and measurement conditions for trace gases in very low amount fractions, usage of coated materials is in demand in gas metrology and atmospheric measurement communities. This study focuses on the testing of different materials or coatings that are currently used, or may be relevant in future for the measurements of greenhouse gases. For this study, we used the previously tested small volume cylinders, which were constructed such that they can serve as adsorption test chambers. Various materials with or without coatings were loaded into the small cylinder to test their adsorption/desorption behavior. We used the aluminum cylinder as the measurement chamber, and glass, aluminum, copper, brass, steel and three different commercially available coatings as test materials. Inserting the test materials into the measurement chamber doubles the available geometric area for the surface processes. The presented experiments were designed to investigate the pressure dependency up to 15 bar, and temperature dependency up to 80 °C for the test materials placed in the measurement chamber. Here, we focused on the species CO2, CH4, CO and H2O measured by a cavity ring down spectroscopy analyzer. Our results show that the materials currently used in atmospheric measurements are well-suited. The investigated coatings were not superior to untreated aluminum or to stainless steel at the tested pressure ranges, whereas under changing temperature aluminum showed better performance for CO2 (< 0.05 μmol mol−1 change in measured amount fractions) than stainless steel (> 0.1 μmol mol−1). To our knowledge, this study is one of the first attempts to investigate surface effects of different materials in such a setup for the above-mentioned gases.