We have developed a low-cost, miniaturized laser heterodyne radiometer for highly sensitive measurements of carbon dioxide (CO 2) in the atmospheric column. In this passive design, sunlight that has undergone absorption by CO 2 in the atmosphere is collected and mixed with continuous wave laser light that is step-scanned across the absorption feature centered at 1,573.6 nm. The resulting radio frequency beat signal is collected as a function of laser wavelength, from which the total column mole fraction can be de-convolved. We are expanding this technique to include methane (CH 4) and carbon monoxide (CO), and with minor modifications, this technique can be expanded to include species such as water vapor (H 2 O) and nitrous oxide (N 2 O).

We present column CO2 measurements taken by the passive miniaturized laser heterodyne radiometer (Mini-LHR) at 1611.51 nm at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The Mini-LHR was operated autonomously, during the month of May 2013 at this site, working in tandem with an AERONET sun photometer that measures aerosol optical depth at 15-min intervals during daylight hours. Laser heterodyne radiometry has been used since the 1970s to measure atmospheric gases such as ozone, water vapor, methane, ammonia, chlorine monoxide, and nitrous oxide. This iteration of the technology utilizes distributed feedback lasers to produce a low-cost, small, portable sensor that has potential for global deployment. Applications of this instrument include supplementation of existing monitoring networks to provide denser global coverage, providing validation for larger satellite missions, and targeting regions of carbon flux uncertainty. Also presented here are preliminary retrieval analysis and the performance analysis that demonstrate that the Mini-LHR responds extremely well to changes in the atmospheric absorption.

Presented here is a sensitivity analysis for the miniaturized laser heterodyne radiometer. This passive, ground-based instrument measures carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmospheric column and has been under development at NASA/GSFC since 2009. The goal of this development is to produce a low-cost, easily-deployable instrument that can extend current ground measurement networks in order to (1) validate column satellite observations, (2) provide coverage in regions of limited satellite observations, (3) target regions of interest such as thawing permafrost, and (4) support the continuity of a long-term climate record. In this paper an uncertainty analysis of the instrument performance is presented and compared with results from three sets of field measurements. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and corresponding maximum uncertainty for a single scan are calculated to be 329.4 ± 1.3 by deploying error propagation through the equation governing the SNR. Reported is an absorbance noise of 0.0024 for six averaged scans of field data, for an instrument precision of 0.14 ppmv for CO2.