Laser Heterodyne Radiometry for the Vertical Profile Measurement of Greenhouse Gases in Coastal Wetlands
Open Access DepositedThe magnitude of the atmosphere-land carbon exchange rate is arguably the largest source of uncertainty in our understanding of climate change. Accurate vertical profiles of pressure and temperature are essential for the retrieval of precise greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations from many remote sensing instruments. The focus of this dissertation at George Washington University (GWU), in collaboration with Mesa Photonics, has been in the development and deployment of a Laser Heterodyne Radiometer (LHR) that simultaneously measures CO2, CH4, H2O, and O2 mixing ratios throughout the troposphere and lower stratosphere. To constrain the spectral fits, a data extraction, visualization, and analysis program was written to extract pressure and temperature profiles from the meteorology data measured by radiosondes as part of NOAA’s Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA). The second prototype instrument, developed as part of this dissertation, is housed in an observatory installed at the Global Change Environmental Wetland (GCREW) at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) near Edgewater, Maryland. An atmospheric path simulation program, called LahetraSim, was developed for spectral fitting of LHR data. The results from this simulation are fed into a fitting program that was previously developed at GWU and modified to provide layer concentration information from the spectral fits. The data record from this instrument is not only complementary to other surface concentration and flux measurements but is also complementary to satellite measurements and can be useful in determining transport and land-air surface exchange rates at larger scales.
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