Hybrid-Autonomous Greenhouse Gas Emissions Survey & Quantification HV360

Biochar offers the potential to remove carbon from the atmosphere or to prevent GHG emissions from soils and agriculture. However, the quantification and efficacy of this potential carbon reduction is uncertain. This project aims to develop and test a measurement-based solution to assess GHG storage in soils. To quantify carbon exchange between the atmosphere and the surface, we will build and test a measurement system which combines laser scanning and aerial drones to quantify carbon sinks from biochar-mediated soils by mapping concentrations of CO2, CH4 and N2O in the atmosphere over a landscape treated with biochar in an effort to lock away carbon in soils. By comparing this with measurements over an untreated area, we can compare the impacts of biochar intervention with an untreated baseline which will help to assess the potential benefit of using biochar more widely.

The Climate Change Paris Agreement and subsequent Glasgow COP26 agreements include an important new requirement for national signatories to validate GHG emissions through measurement. Legislation will focus on the accuracy and the exact amounts of GHG emissions reported by countries to the United Nations. High quality and verifiable emissions data is a key enabler for GHG mitigation actions.

This requirement is critical and demands innovation. The challenge is not just in detecting and measuring GHGs (often at low concentrations), but in understanding how the exchange of GHGs between the Earth's surface and our atmosphere takes place.

Our project will develop and test a new automated survey and mapping system that will measure high-precision GHG concentrations in three dimensions. It will combine advanced ground-based lasers that use dispersion spectroscopy to measure gas concentrations, with airborne drones to create a sampling system that can image plumes above an area of interest for GHG emissions (or sinks). This new detailed mapping would provide a reliable survey ability to efficiently quantify GHG concentrations and their net exchange between the surface and atmosphere (flux) with high accuracy. Such data could provide the basis for advanced data analytics to establish climate change impacts of emitters (and carbon sinks), with clear scope for commercial applications to routinely monitor areas of interest to GHG remediation and emission.