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

现在国际上都承认，气候变化是对整个星球上人类未来生活方式的一个非常真实和重要的威胁。这导致了对人类引起的气候变化的重大社会和政策担忧，我们缺乏一些关于“温室气体”(GHGs)来源和汇的非常重要的基本数据。一些最重要的温室气体既被陆地和水生系统释放和吸收，又很难计算出特定地区，如集水区，是这些气体的净源或汇，以及管理和气候变化将如何影响这些平衡。环境科学家甚至无法说出某一块土地是最常见温室气体的净源还是汇，这实际上是相当尴尬的；尽管如此，在缺乏这些基本知识的情况下，目前正在就能源生产、运输以及(与当前的NERC常量营养素循环方案特别相关的)、土地利用和集水区管理做出关键的国家和国际决策。不幸的是，我们往往没有必要的数据，因为这些通量很难测量，而且劳动密集型，而且它们可能在不同地点迅速变化，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正的问题。我们迫切需要新的自动化技术来处理这些测量问题，而这项提议是对建立新型温室气体自动测量系统所需资金的请求。在体育赛事中，人们经常会瞥见一台“电传”相机，它在动作上方盘旋，快速从一个点移动到另一个点，提供独特的、动态的鸟瞰图像，拍摄下面的场景。这种基于计算机的“飞行”技术现在发展得很好，相当普遍地被用来移动相机、风景(偶尔也会用来移动流行歌星！)在各种不同的竞技场上。我们的建议非常简单--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先编程，以便在我们需要的时间和位置放置我们专门的‘通量’室，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上方气体浓度的3D图像。这意味着我们将能够找到气体释放或吸收的“热点”。这是以前从未做过的，需要约克大学三个不同系的科学家共同努力；我们有电子学、直升机飞行控制、大气化学和生态学家的专家一起工作，看看我们能否在约克大学建造一个原型系统。如果我们能让它发挥作用，这些应用程序是巨大的，可能成为一项全新的、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.