Portable nitrous oxide sensor for understanding agricultural and soil emissions

Nitrous oxide is the third most important greenhouse gas (GHG,) with an atmospheric lifetime of ~114 years and a global warming impact ~300 times greater than that of CO2. The main cause of nitrous oxide’s atmospheric increase is anthropogenic emissions, and over 80% of the current global anthropogenic flux is related to agriculture, including associated land-use change. An accurate assessment of N2O emissions from agriculture is vital not only for understanding the global N2O balance and its impact on climate and also for designing crop systems with lower GHG emissions. Such assessments are currently hampered by the lack of instrumentation and methodologies to measure ecosystem-level fluxes at appropriate spatial and temporal scales. Southwest Sciences and Princeton University are developing and testing new open-path eddy covariance instrumentation for continuous and fast (10 Hz) measurement of nitrous oxide emissions. An important advance, now being implemented, is the use of new mid-infrared laser sources that enable the development of exceptionally low power (1200 worldwide) for direct measurements of N2O exchange. The technology can be more broadly applied to gas monitoring requirements in industry, environmental monitoring, health and safety, etc.