In today’s developing world, climate change is impacting heavily on humanity by altering global weather patterns, increasing severity of storms, and more. For example, the extraction and refining of fossil fuels produces excess methane and its global warming potential is 25 times that of CO2. Therefore, the need exist for flare remote sensing methods to detect global warming gases emission that are better than current methods like satellite monitoring, ground-mounted thermal imagers, and stack-mounted chemical sensors.
Researchers at GW are developing two laser heterodyne radiometers. The first system will be focused on detecting potassium, and the second system will have two generations. In the first instance, a heterodyne unit will be built at ~2000 cm-1 for detecting carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide radiative emissions. And in the second instance, a source close to ~2780 cm-1 will be used to detect radiative emissions from methane. The motive of this proposal is to demonstrate field-deployable systems for characterization of biofuel fires.
Figure: - Project use case: remote sensing of wildfires. (a) Schematic illustrating deployment geometry for MIR LHR system, (b) Illustration of field deployment
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