Weather Monitoring Company Turns to Greenhouse Gases
The company behind one of the largest networks of weather monitoring stations on the planet — and the purveyor of the ubiquitous WeatherBug application and Web site — is betting that providing greenhouse gas data will also prove to be a lucrative market.
by Tom Zeller, Jr., New York Times, January 12, 2011
AWS Convergence Technologies of Maryland plans to announce on Wednesday that it is rebranding itself Earth Networks, and that it will be making a capital investment of $25 million over the next five years to deploy a network of 150 greenhouse gas sensors at various sites around the planet — 100 in the United States, 25 in Europe and 25 more at locales yet to be determined.
The network, which will initially monitor concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane — two critical greenhouse gases — will be the first commercial venture of its kind and will substantially increase the density and level of detail of currently available greenhouse gas data.
Today, such data are collected through a patchwork of several dozen monitoring sites operated by a mixture of government and academic entities around the globe, including fewer than a dozen in the United States. These typically provide broad, planetary snapshots of greenhouse gas concentrations.
The Earth Networks system would be capable of real-time measurements at the national and even regional level, allowing regulators to more accurately pinpoint emissions sources.
The data could also become a starting point for verifying whether individual countries or regions are complying with international or local agreements aimed at cutting greenhouse gases. The lack of robust monitoring capability has been a key sticking point in international climate negotiations.
Picarro, a Silicon Valley manufacturer of gas analyzers, has been tapped to provide the initial suite of sensors, which will cost about $50,000 each. Picarro’s chief executive, Michael Woelk, suggested that as countries and governments increasingly grappled with the rise in greenhouse gases, sales of monitoring equipment were likely to grow rapidly.
“The only way you can know that emissions are coming down is to measure,” he said. “You’ve got to measure the air.”
Nearly all inventories of greenhouse gas emissions rely on self-reporting by companies and governments, and they often use predictive modeling, rather than direct collection of emissions data.
The Earth Networks system will use “inverse modeling,” a technique that allows researchers to combine actual atmospheric data with the real-time weather information it already harvests — like wind direction and speed, atmospheric pressures and sunlight — to more accurately identify where greenhouse gases are coming from, where they are moving and how concentrations fluctuate over time and in various conditions.
Still, much about the Earth Networks system remains uncertain, including how much the company will charge commercial customers, and precisely where sensors will be located. So far just two stations have been deployed, in California and Maryland.
Robert S. Marshall, the chief executive of Earth Networks, said he expected to market the data to many of the subscribers to the company’s weather information, which included governments, energy companies and media outlets.
Earth Networks also plans to include some greenhouse gas information in its free and premium WeatherBug offerings, and the full range of data will be made available to the academic and research communities at no cost.
The venture is being undertaken in partnership with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a leading earth and climate research organization at the University of California, San Diego. Scripps, which will be licensed to use the data for research purposes, is providing expertise in choosing and calibrating equipment, as well as designing the network and choosing monitoring sites. Part of the $25 million outlay will also be used to establish the Earth Networks Center for Climate Research at the Scripps Institution.
Tony Haymet, the director of the Scripps Institution, said he and Earth Networks shared the goal of spurring the growth of more networked monitoring by a variety of entities, which could conceivably interconnect with Earth Networks’ sensors to provide a far more nuanced picture of where greenhouse gases are being emitted and absorbed.
“We hope we’ll go viral,” Mr. Haymet said, “so that over time we’ll have more sites and more gases being measured.”
Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said he was cautiously optimistic about the new commercial venture, though he said much would hinge on the scientific community’s ability to duplicate and verify Earth Networks’ data. He also expressed reservations about the influence of commercial data collection on an issue so crucial to the scientific community and to the future of the planet.
“Everything right now is, for the most part, fully transparent,” said Mr. Tans, who oversees the federal government’s system for monitoring greenhouse gas emissions. “So, if there is a commercial company providing data, is it going to be fully available? It could be that a certain portion of the transparency is going to be taken away.”
Still, he said, the looming threat of climate change will inevitably drive a market for accurate and objective accounting systems. “Emissions sooner or later — and probably sooner — are going to be worth money,” Mr. Tans said. “And the amount of money is likely to become very large.”
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