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

现在，国际社会普遍认为，气候变化是对我们整个地球人类未来生活方式的一个非常真实的和重要的威胁。这导致了对人类引起的气候变化的重大社会和政策关注，我们缺乏一些非常重要的基础数据的来源和汇的“温室气体”（GHG）。一些最重要的温室气体既被陆地系统又被水生系统释放和吸收，因此很难确定某一特定地区，如集水区，是这些气体的净源还是净汇，也很难确定管理和气候变化将如何影响这些平衡。当环境科学家甚至无法说明某块土地是最常见的温室气体的净源还是净汇时，他们实际上相当尴尬;尽管如此，在缺乏这一基本知识的情况下，目前正在就能源生产、运输和（与目前的NERC宏量营养素循环方案特别相关的）土地利用和集水管理作出关键的国家和国际决定。不幸的是，我们经常没有必要的数据，因为这些通量很难测量，而且需要大量劳动力，而且它们可以从一个地方迅速变化到另一个地方，甚至在几个小时内变化-这种高度的空间和时间异质性对我们来说是一个真实的问题。我们迫切需要新的自动化技术来处理这些测量问题，本提案要求提供必要的资金，以建立一个新型的自动温室气体测量系统。 在体育赛事中，人们经常会瞥见一台“电传操纵”摄像机，它盘旋在比赛现场上方，从一个点迅速移动到另一个点，并提供下面场景的独特动态鸟瞰图像。这种基于计算机的“飞行”技术现在已经发展得很好，并且通常用于移动相机，布景（偶尔还有流行歌星！）在各种不同的竞技场上。我们的建议很简单--我们希望首次应用这种技术，在复杂的地形上进行温室气体源-汇的自动测量。这一切不仅可以自动预编程，以便在我们需要的时间和地点放置我们专门的“通量”室，它还可以用于提供治疗，携带特殊相机或使我们能够创建采样区域气体浓度的3D图像。这将意味着我们将能够找到气体释放或吸收的“热点”。这是前所未有的，需要来自约克大学三个不同系的科学家的共同努力;我们有电子学、直升机飞行控制、大气化学和生态学家方面的专家，他们都在共同努力，看看我们是否能在约克大学建立一个原型系统。如果我们能让它工作，应用是巨大的，并可能成为一个全新的，基于英国的技术的基础。

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.