Spending days camping in a mosquito-filled swamp on the Indonesian island of Borneo, Alison Hoyt’s goal was to measure methane emissions in tropical wetlands – one of the largest sources of the potent greenhouse gas. Then a graduate student, Hoyt spent a lot of time installing and monitoring sensors in challenging field conditions. Specialized environmental methane sensors cost upwards of $30,000 and struggled with the extreme humidity. Now at Stanford, Hoyt and collaborators are working on a new approach to overcome these challenges: calibrating commercially available sensors to do the job at a fraction of the cost. Networks of these sensors could be left unattended in remote field sites to continuously monitor emissions.

“My experiences in the field really motivated me to find a better way to collect data,” Hoyt said. “Getting a handle on greenhouse gas emissions gets more urgent every day, and no one knows exactly why methane levels in the atmosphere keep rising.”

Para leer más ingrese a:

https://woods.stanford.edu/news/getting-handle-potent-climate-threat