In light of the recent report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), skeptical attacks on the science from as far back as the 1970s continue to mire the advancement of the still nonexistent policies to control anthropogenic emissions.

The IPCC report gives little information on the methodologies used to collect their seemingly unequivocal data.  Fellow alumnist, PhD candidate, and friend, Troy Ribaudo of UMASS Lowell, was generous enough to lend his time to speak exclusively with Green Air on the science of cutting edge climate technology.  He sheds light on the traditional methods of climate gas concentration detection and how the invention of the quantum cascade laser is calcifying the IPCC’s findings with a degree of irrefutable accuracy.

Full transcript below.

Q: What are some of the environmental impacts of the research that you’re conducting?

A-1 (short answer): Well Rich, my research is focused around creating a hand held, low cost, easy to use atmospheric sensing device.  Through the creation of quantum cascade lasers and  detection abilities, we’re now able to create hand held devices that can detect the gas in the air around you to amazing degrees of accuracy. This is very useful for environmental  monitoring techniques and for long-term sensitive data collection of the evolution of our air, our atmosphere, what we breathe.

A2 (scientific answer): The environmental impact of my research focuses around the detection of airborne components in our atmosphere and how their concentration varies over time.  Traditional methods revolve around broadband mid-infrared sources coupled with a complicated set of machinery to analyze the absorption of radiation that’s characteristic of certain gasses and from that information, determine their concentrations and how they change over time, specifically ozone and other noxious greenhouse gasses.  The new aspect of our work is a compact, low-power, mobile, and much more sensitive radiation source, which is a quantum  cascade laser.  It emits a variety of frequencies of light but in a very narrow and specific spectral range corresponding to the enhanced absorption of certain molecules like nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide, ozone, formaldehyde, and all these other chemicals that combine in the lower and upper atmosphere to form these bad chemicals.

Through our work we’ve been able to streamline the efficiency of the handheld device so that more constant and more widely dispersed sensors can be installed in the field to get more data on how the atmospheric  chemistry evolves in time.  Just from the recent years of observation, the change in chemical concentrations is pretty large and obviously we’re all seeing the impact.

Q: How is this method better than what we’ve been using?

A: The traditional methods of spectroscopic investigation involve large machines, especially for the mid-infrared spectral range of the 4a transform, the infrared spectrometer is the machine of choice but it often is the size of a table for this type of resolution accuracy needed, but the new narrow band tunable quantum cascade laser technique fits the light and the detection device just to those parts of the spectrum important for these chemicals so we’ve effectively streamlined detectional schemes.  It’s not that the new methods are more accurate, it’s that they are easier to impliment to disperse in a wide network of sensing
devices.

Q: Like a roof-mounted airplane device?

A: Exactly, or something in your backyard. The more data we can collect on the atmosphere, the better we’ll understand our society’s impact on it and how to better keep our air clean and our earth healthy.

Q: What is the field that this is accociated with?  Is it climatology, is it quantum, is it physics, is it the study of light?  What is our context?

A: Well Rich, the forefront of the research that I’m participating in is the study of the quantum cascade laser and this device, that was made about 14 years ago, has provided man with a new laser science technique that was an unachievable goal through more traditional methods.   The main point is that through this device’s invention and subsequent strives toward perfection, we’ve expanded man’s… basically it’s called spectroscopic techniques.  And what that means is, by looking at how a sample, be it a liquid or a gas or some material, how it absorbs certain frequencies of light.  (These are) things we can’t see with our eyes, specifically toward the infrared region which usually we perceive as heat, like from a fire, that radiant energy that warms your hands, it’s just light, like we see with our eyes but our eyes can’t see it.  By making lasers that operate at these invisible frequencies, we’ve made this compact, efficienct, portable source that we apply toward detection of greenhouse gasses as well as other sorts of atmospheric toxins from the free-space absorption of molecules, which is a long way of saying that we can see the molecules with light that we can’t see with our eyes.  So, using this technique, we can now measure the changes in our atmosphere and our ozone layer and as these greenhouse gasses have their impact and change the dynamics, we’ll witness the changes.

Q: Will we be able to get more accurate information over a shorter period of time?

A: Absolutely.  Our previous measurement techniques involved core ice samples where we looked at atmospheric concentrations from hundreds of years ago.  Now we’re able to monitor in real time - we put these machines on tops of planes travelling at ultra-high altitudes and get a 3-dimentional topographic measurement of atmospheric concentrations.  With continued monitoring, we can see an hourly change, nevermind hundreds of years.  In fact, in our measurements thus far, we’ve seen disturbing trends.  The hole in the ozone layer exists, it changes constantly, it grows and shrinks but unpredictability is the name of the
environmental disaster.

Q: What are the costs associated with the operation and manufacture of this new kind of laser?

A: Operational costs are minimal. It does not take a great deal of electricity to power these devices or the detectors that measure them.  You’d need a good strong batter, we’re not talking like a 9-volt here… lithium ions.

Q: We were talking about the Large Hadron Collider which is a billion dollar experiment and the world’s best and brightest physicists are working on this project and it’s the least Green thing on the earth right now.  And you know what, I said this to Jen Shannon, who’s also another physics student at Columbia University, who yelled at me - FREAKED OUT at me when I said this was the least Green thing happening.

A: The Large Hadron Collider is one of the pinnacles of the physical sciences.  The machine, the experiment, is gigantic.  The tube that comprises the LHC is something like 30 feet in diameter and goes dozens of miles around in a huge arc.  The fabrication costs for this pinnacle of scientific experiment is enormous (as well) as the chemicals required to make those components.