Objective Climate Monitoring Networks

New CO2 analysis technology is proposed to enable development of environmental infrastructure consisting of dense networks of towers that can monitor urban air pollution, validate observations from CO2 satellites and complement the sparsely populated tower network of NOAA/GMD. The analysis technology will be mounted at height on tower and interconnected wirelessly to form a distributed sensor network having real time communication of observations to program hub. Targeted attributes are: (i) broadband precision of 1 ppmv with capability to integrate atmospheric fluctuations to 0.10 accuracy, (ii) low power use derived from a small (14) photovoltaic panel setting the physical scale of the payload, (iii) onboard integration for 1 hr data reporting, (iv) unit cost less than $5k and (v) maintenance cycle of one year, enabling routine deployment of networks populated by 100s of individual towers, a size well within the scale of a moderate monitoring program.Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: The proposed development leading to commercialization consists of three phases. They are demonstration: (i) of analyzer accuracy under full-range environmental conditions, (ii) of networked instrument viability including in-situ validation and maintenance cycle and (iii) by deployment of a high density sensor network in an American city