Chemical Technology November-December 2016

CONTROL AND INSTRUMENTATION

Environmental monitoring in the rain forest of Costa Rica by Dr William Kaiser, Department of Electrical Engineering, UCLA and Dr Philip Rundel, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA, Los Angeles, California To better understand the impact of the emission of greenhouse gases on the environment, researchers are conducting a study at La Selva Biological Station in the Costa Rican rain forest to measure the exchange of CO 2 (also known as the carbon flux) and other materials between the forest floor and the atmosphere.

T he challenge consisted of supporting a wide range of wireless environmental measurements using a sing le device that provides robotic control, remote configuration, and data sharing over the Web for a mea- surement system that researchers use to characterise the forest understory microclimate and fluxes of car- bon between the rain forest floor and the atmosphere. Using National Instruments (NI) LabVIEW software and NI CompactRIO hardware, researchers developed a wire- less sensor system that collects a variety of environmental measurements, offers remote configuration capabilities, permits future expansion, and gives researchers around the world access to the measurements over the Internet. Approximately 70% of solar energy is absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere. As the Earth’s surface emits this energy in the form of thermal radiation, the atmosphere

naturally captures and recycles a large portion of it, keeping the planet warm. This process is known as the greenhouse effect. Recently, the greenhouse effect has been artificially enhanced by the increased emission of gases that absorb infrared radiation such as carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), methane, and nitrous oxide. The increased absorption of thermal radiation may contribute to the Earth’s climate change known as global warming. Conducting carbon flux research in the Costa Rican rain forest To better understand the impact of the emission of green- house gases on the environment, researchers are conduct- ing a study at La Selva Biological Station in the Costa Rican rain forest to measure the exchange of CO 2 (als o known as the carbon flux) and other materials between the for-

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Chemical Technology • November/December 2016