[New Project] advr: an R package for the scientific research on trace gas advection flux density
Repo
https://github.com/pzhaonet/advr
Background
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the key green house gases which play an important role in the global climate change. In academia, the sources and sinks of CO2 are estimated with the flux density, e.g. the amount of CO2 passing through a unit area in a unit time. Estimates of net ecosystem CO2 exchange have been attracting a lot of attention. The research on the advection flux takes care of the contribution of the advection term to the CO2 balance.
The advection measurement is very complex. A typical advection measurement consists of horizontal and vertical profiles of the CO2 mixing ratio, the air temperature, the air humidity, the air pressure, as well as chamber flux measurement. A datalogger and a microcontroller work together, which control many solenoid valves to switch the sample lines, save the data. Most of the data are recorded every a few seconds, continuously lasting several days, which makes it difficult to check the data quality and the status of the instruments.
Figure 1. Sketch of a typical advection measurement. I image the man with a cup of coffee should be me. But who should be the woman...
What is the project about?
advr is an open source R package for the advection measurement of trace gases. Currently, the version 0.0.0 has three components:
- a logger program for controlling the data logger CR1000
- a microcontroller program for controlling Arduino MEGA2560.
- R functions to process the raw meteorological and ecological data.
An output of advr is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. A demo output of advr.
Technology Stack
steemr is developed in R language. The data logger program is written with the CRBasic language. The microcontroller program is composed of functions written in C/C++.
Roadmap
In the future, I am going to add much more features to advr, such as
- quality control of the raw advection flux data,
- automatic calculation of the advection flux,
- improvement of the chamber flux calculation with the state-of-art techniques,
- automatic visualization of quality control result and flux components (Figure 3) with a single click,
- building a user-friendly web UI for those who knows nothing of R language.
Figure 3. One of the future plans: Visualization of the flux components of an advection measurement with a single click.
How to contribute?
Anyone can get in touch with me by leaving me a reply on steem 