Last year I had the opportunity to travel to the top of Mauna Loa, on
the Big Island of Hawaii, where the NOAA observatory has been continually
taking atmospheric CO2 readings since March of 1958 by physically sampling
the air.
Now researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) have developed a system that can measure four greenhouse gases at
once: methane, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and nitrous oxide, using
laser-based precision spectroscopy utilising the optical frequency comb
technique.
The optical frequency comb helped win the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Rahul Rao, IEEE Spectrum
One of the system’s initial focuses was on measuring methane, which has more potential to cause warming than carbon dioxide. Humans release methane from burning fossil fuels (especially oil and natural gas) and from industrial-scale agriculture (notoriously, burps and flatulence of ruminants like cows and sheep).
So the NIST group took their technology into the field—literally, to gauge the emissions from a field full of cows. It’s now widely used for that purpose. It’s also used to detect gas leaks.
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9 July 2021 article in IEEE Spectrum by Rahul Rao here :-
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise...eenhouse-gases
Paper on using this laser optical comb technology to measure methane
emissions at a cattle farm :-
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/14/eabe9765