Saturday, October 2, 2010

Defining Background CO2

Hey guys,

Nadine and I were discussing possible ways of defining background CO2 that would be measurable and relevant to what we are looking to investigate.

Since traffic patterns are one of the more interesting aspects that we are looking to capture, we thought that we could define background CO2 by excluding traffic sources. That would likely mean taking flask measurements at times of low traffic flow i.e 3am on a Sunday...which is technically 3 am on a monday. I think that this is feasible, and doable. We could measure background CO2 at the start of the experiment, and then again near the end, just to see if there are any non-traffic related changes. This would lump biogenic, industrial etc.. together, which isn't ideal, but it's something.

One potential problem that we could encounter is a time lag between when CO2 is emitted via gasoline combustion and when it gets dispersed in the atmosphere, which is something that I'm looking into.

Does anyone have any other suggestions for defining background CO2?

Ariella

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