Atmospheric sensing Living Lab

The Spectroscopy Group has established a new facility integral to its R&D program in atmospheric sensing instrumentation and data analysis: The “Living Lab” located on the roof of the RAL Space building housing the group laboratory. The site is located at the heart of the Harwell campus.

The living lab is currently composed of:

• the TCCON observatory that provides reference gold standard data on greenhouse gas atmospheric composition linked to the international network (supported by NERC NCEO),
• some greenhouse gas multi-open-path analysers capable of tomographic reconstruction of gas plumes and gas emission maps (supported by STFC I2F programme),
• associated gravimetric controlled gas release equipment to simulate controlled leaks, vents, or diffuse gas emission sources,
• some novel ground-based atmospheric profiling instrument currently under development and being tested against the TCCON standard (supported by ESA and NERC),
• the ground-based version of the scientific payloads being developed for the SOLSTICE limb sounding cubesat mission (supported by CEOI),
• the Bruker EM27/Sun spectrometer from University of Leicester part of the GEMINI/GEMMA programme,
• a MAX-DOAS instrument measuring trace gas relevant to air quality to contribute to satellite data ground-based validation (supported by STFC South Africa NRF collaboration programme)

The living lab is being used with collaborators to test gas sensing systems (hardware and analytics), compared new technologies and techniques against standard established measurement systems, and validate the full end-to-end measuring system performance through controlled gas releases.