Research opportunities are available to advance the measurement of greenhouse-gas emissions from point sources such as power plants and distributed area sources such as landfills, farms and sequestration sites. Accurate greenhouse-gas measurements are required to improve the quality and comparability of emissions inventories; to reduce the discrepancy between the measured rate of increase of the global atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and the predicted increase based on summing the individual emission sources and sinks; and to support efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Current research efforts focus on improving standoff methods for measuring the flux of carbon dioxide from smokestacks and distributed area sources (5 km x 5 km) by advancing the applications of integrated path differential absorption LIDAR (IPDA) and aerosol backscatter differential absorption LIDAR (DIAL) techniques.

Resources: For DIAL experiments, an electro-optic modulator based scanning spectrometer for performing rapid scans (up to 40 kHz) using arbitrary waveform generators (1.59 to 1.65 μm), a 100 Hz YAG pumped OPO (1.59 to 1.65 μm),  a 5 kHz 1 kW (peak) fiber amplifier (near 1.57 μm), and a 500 kHz 300 W (peak) fiber amplifier (1.6 μm).  Numerous receivers are available including several 10” and 16” Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes each equipped with a PMT and photon counting system for backscatter detection over integrated paths to/from hard targets and over range resolved paths to/from atmospheric aerosol particles. Other systems include several PCIe based acquisition system (200 MS/sec, 2 GS/sec, 4 GS/sec on two channels) for streaming data from the PMTs or other detectors, two independent DFB laser systems, numerous broadband electro-optic modulators, a two Mach-Zehnder waveguide based I/Q modulator for fast and precise frequency control of the seed laser sources.

key words

LIDAR; DIAL; Electro-optic dual optical-frequency combs, Carbon dioxide; Emission flux; Greenhouse gases emissions; Climate change

Citizenship:  Open to U.S. citizens

Level:  Open to Postdoctoral applicants