PICARRO

Full Name: Picarro Wavelength-Scanning Ringdown Spectroscopic Instrument for Airborne In Situ CO2 and CH4 Quantification
Short Name or Acronym:PICARRO

Measurements Made and Methods Used

Measurements Provided: Concentration of CO2 and CH4
Manufacturer or Builder of the Instrument: Picarro (a commercial instrument manufactured for use on research aircraft)

Operational Status:
- requestable, ready for deployment (Preliminary assessment)
- requestable, but has problems, needs work before deployment
General Description:
- See the figures below. Cavity ring-down is a technique where an oscillation in a cavity is damped by absorption, and the rate of damping is used to determine the concentration of the absorbing species. The diagrams includes the optical configuration, the typical detector response, and a typical "plumbing" configuration. A cryotrap removes water vapor, a primary interfering species.
Measurement Characteristics:
- Overall estimate of uncertainty:
- Response time: 0.2 s (vendor supplied characteristic, not verified)
- Precision: 250 ppbv CO2, 3 ppbv CH4
- Other measurement characteristics (comments on signal/noise, bias limits, etc):

Description of Software, Data Handling, and Data Flow:
- Software Components (data acquisition, display, processing, and analysis):
- Data Processing Chain (from flight to archival): Data processing follows the standard data path for RAF measurements: instrument -> NIDAS -> nimbus -> netCDF archives. See this page for more information.
QA Procedures and Needs:

Lead Contacts

Documentation

Descriptive Publications
Documentation of the Processing Algorithm(s): See the Technical Note on Processing Algorithms at this URL (fix when available)

Internal users: See http://wiki.eol.ucar.edu/rafscience/PICARRO (last edited 2012-12-08)