A single instrument for simultaneous monitoring of greenhouse gases and air pollutants

Urban air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are two closely linked problems. They can be attributed to a variety of sources, such as transportation and buildings, waste management and agricultural production, natural events such as forest fires and many others. Monitoring air pollutants and GHG simultaneously with high selectivity and sensitivity enables to detect and evaluate their sources and sinks and to discover the links between them. Precise measurements at various spatial and temporal scales are required for modelling and validation of emission inventories or satellite observations. 

Solutions to monitor air pollutants or GHG with high precision and temporal resolution were commonly offered as “one-species-one-instrument”, leading to large, immobile measurement setups with high energy consumption. We provide a new compact laser absorption spectrometer that combines several mid-IR lasers. Our solution allows simultaneous high-precision measurements of the greenhouse gases CO₂, N₂O, H₂O and CH₄, and the pollutants CO, NO, NO₂, O₃, SO₂ and NH₃ within a single instrument and is therefore well suited to detect the relations of the co-emitted pollutants and GHGs.

In our contribution, we will demonstrate examples of our instruments’ applications for mobile monitoring of 10 GHGs and air pollutants in urban areas and airborne measurements with airships. Furthermore, we will present the results of parallel monitoring with our instrument and standard conventional gas analysers used for GHG and air pollutant measurements. It demonstrates the ability of our instrument to serve as an all-in-one solution and to replace up to 7 standard gas analysers opening a wide range of new mobile multi-compound gas monitoring applications, for example, in (small) airplanes or cars.