Monitoring of short-lived climate pollutants by laser absorption pectroscopy

摘要

Global efforts to mitigate climate change have largely focused on reducing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO_2), which is responsible for 55-60% of current anthropogenic radiative forcing on warming impact. Because of its long lifetime (~130 years [1]) in the atmosphere, long-lasting CO_2 will remain the primary driver of long-term temperature rise even if new CO_2 emissions dropped to zero. A "fast-action" climate mitigation strategies is therefore strongly needed to provide more sizeable short-term benefits than CO_2 reductions by reducing emission of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs), having atmospheric lifetimes of less than 20 years [2], which would allow for short-term drops in atmospheric concentrations and hence slow climate change over the next several decades. Monitoring of climatically and environmentally active SLCPs is important not only for policy-based reporting, but also for basic process-based understanding of climate related processes in the atmosphere. In this talk, we will overview our recent progress in the developments and applications of laser-based optical instruments for the measurements of environmental and livestock emitted methane (CH4), as well as the measurement of black carbon (BC) absorption. The experimental detail, the preliminary measurement results, the corresponding data processing and analysis will be presented.