Although I consider myself a “climate change” skeptic – at least so far as the phrase is interpreted today – I do believe in making accurate measurements: “Science” is never … settled.
In my career, many of my projects involved some form of “environmental monitoring (which led to my PhD in geophysics rather than electronics). My most recent projects were supported by NASA, one of which involved measurements of CO2 by means of laser absorption from an aircraft based instrument.
This discussion gets into some of the aspects of the environment from within which measurements are made.
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Atmospheric CO2 – Introduction
An example of one reason I chose geophysics for my PhD rather than electronics is demonstrated in the following discussion. […]
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Atmospheric CO2 – Abstract
It is useful to have a “best-case” expectation of measurement parameters and uncertainties in order to optimize instrumentation methods and […]
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Atmospheric CO2 – Beer-Lambert & Optical Depth
Expression Development: Beer-Lambert Law* Consider a section of optical path having length dz as shown below. The photon flux is […]
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Atmospheric CO2 – Geometrical Construction
While many approaches to collecting the desired information of interest are under consideration, the structure of the measurement environment is […]
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Atmospheric CO2 – Atmosphere Elements
Density is a measure of the number of particles per volume. Recall that one form of the Beer-Lambert defines attenuation […]
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Atmospheric CO2 – Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
This discussion of atmosphere is based on the idealized Standard Atmosphere Model parameters. Adding physical variations to this ideal representation […]
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Atmospheric CO2 – Absorption Cross-Section
The effective absorption cross-section of the species of interest: CO2 is very highly dependent on wavelength as shown in the […]
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ORIG – Atmospheric CO2 – Attenuation Elements
Particles that are transparent to the beam are not of concern here. This leaves only attenuation elements – those elements […]
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Atmospheric CO2 – Plots
All plots use parameters as listed unless noted [1]: CO2 = 380 CO2 = 1.4e-23 HCO2 = 5552To = 288.15 T[z] […]
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Atmospheric CO2 – Basic Reflectivity & Range
This discussion is based on a relative “best-case” experiment – expected variations if everything is “ideal”. A worst-case analysis obviously […]
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Atmospheric CO2 – Photodiodes & Signal Range
A receiving photodiode operates in the same manner as any reverse-biased diode (pn-junction) except for being optimized for such operation. […]
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Atmospheric CO2 – Avalanche Photodiodes (APD)
Photodiode Operation The photodiode detector provides the conversion from optical power to electrical current; it is this electrical current which […]
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Atmospheric CO2 – References
from Optical Depth GeometryB – May2014.docx Abshire, J. B., Riris, H., Allan, G. R., Weaver, C. J., Mao, J., Sun, […]
