SkyGas: Development of a new technique for determining watershed/airshed gas fluxes

It is now internationally accepted that climate change is a very real and important threat to the future of our ways of life for human populations across the entire planet. This has lead to major societal and policy concerns about human-induced climate change and we lack some very important basic data on the sources and sinks of 'greenhouse gases' (GHGs). Some of the most important GHGs are both released and taken up by terrestrial and aquatic systems and it is very difficult to work out whether a specific area, such as a catchment, is a net source or sink of these gases and how changes in management and climate will affect these balances. It is actually quite embarrassing for environmental scientists when they are unable to state even whether a particular piece of land is a net source or sink of the most common GHGs; despite this, key national and international decisions are currently being made about energy production, transport and (of particular relevance to the current NERC Macronutrient Cycles Programme), land use and catchment management in the absence of this basic knowledge. Unfortunately, we frequently do not have the necessary data because these fluxes are difficult, and labour intensive, to measure and they can change rapidly from place to place and even over the course of a few hours - this high spatial and temporal heterogeneity is a real problem to us. We urgently need new automatic techniques to deal with these measurement problems, and this proposal is a request for the funding necessary to build a new type of automatic GHG measurement system.
Quite often in sports events one catches a glimpse of a 'fly-by-wire' camera, which hovers above the action, rapidly moving from point to point and delivering unique, dynamic birds-eye images of the scenes below. This computer-based 'flying' technology is now well developed and quite commonly used to move cameras, scenery (and occasionally pop stars!) over a variety of very different arenas. Our proposal is quite simple - we wish to apply this kind of technology, for the first time, to make automatic GHG source-sink measurements over complicated landscapes. Not only can this all be automatically pre-programmed to place our specialised 'flux' chambers when and where we want them, it can also be used to deliver treatments, carry special cameras or enable us to create 3-D images of the concentrations of gases over sampling areas. It will mean that we will be able to find 'hotspots' of gas release or uptake. This has never been done before and will take the combined efforts of scientists from three different Departments at the University of York; we have specialists in electronics, helicopter flight control, atmospheric chemistry and ecologist all working together to see if we can build a prototype system here at the University of York. If we can get it to work, the applications are enormous and could become the basis of an entirely new, UK-based technology.

There are several distinct routes through which the results of the current work will be used to generate maximum impact. The first route is to ensure that the results are published in the highest impact scientific journals and we are convinced that the novel application of this advanced technology will produce a unique and unprecedented dataset worthy of such publication. The PI is also a senior member of staff in the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), which has the primary role of ensuring scientific information is used to inform policy. This is achieved in many ways; through the publication of readily-accessible pamphlets/reports; maintaining an internationally targeted and active web site; specific policy dialogues with politicians ranging from the local and national level (e.g. recent SEI meeting with UK MP in October 2010) through to the international level (e.g. hosting 'side meetings' at the Copenhagen and Cancun COP 16 meetings). SEI employs a specific Climate Change Communications Manager (Marion Davis, Stockholm Office) to ensure broader dissemination of findings from scientific staff at SEI. Many of the SEI staff are also members of a number of international climate change advisory committees (e.g. IPCC, Japan International Cooperation Agency). Additionally, PI is a member of the UK National Centre for Earth Observation community, where there are direct links and joint meetings between the PI and GCM modellers, with two-way dialogue between experimental scientists and modellers informing the structuring and parameterisation of global C cycle models whilst also alerting experimentalists to the data needs of the modellers. In this way, clear pathways link the results from the current project to the GCM modellers/JULES community, through the carbon cycle component of NCEO.
Somewhat unusually, the proposed application of a highly visual, cutting edge technology normally used in the film and entertainment industries will add an extra level of interest from the general public; the University of York Press Office has considerable experience in publicising achievements and this expertise will be applied to the current work, raising more widely the issues of climate change and the global carbon cycle. The successful development of a new approach to environmental monitoring would raise questions about potential commercial opportunities both in the UK and overseas. PI has requested funds to attend a major international scientific meeting (EGU, ESA) towards the end of the project. It is intended that these meetings will act as a 'show case' for this new automated approach to environmental monitoring and, hopefully, generate novel applications and thus stimulating international take-up of this UK-based technology.