Water transports, stirs, mixes, and disperses mass. It exchanges gasses with the atmosphere, primary among them for life and a better understanding of climate change, are carbon dioxide and oxygen. There is a critical need for detailed spatiotemporal monitoring of water’s full transport ability, its mean and turbulent transport capacities, and in particular, the gas transfer velocities at the air-water interface. We present an open-source infrared-based quantitative imaging remote sensing tool that uniquely addresses this critical need. Here we focus on using remotely mounted infrared cameras deployed from fixed platforms, but these tools can be mounted on aerial vehicles, such as drones. While we elect to work with infrared imaging due to its unique ability to sample surface waters absent the requirement for artificial seeding or illumination and its ability to quantify the transport of methane, such as ebullition and aerenchymous transport, the developed tools are equally well suited to visible light images that are adequately illuminated and seeded. We leverage fundamental gas transfer and turbulence theory and the ability of quantitative image velocimetry techniques to extract the instantaneous highly resolved water surface turbulence to calculate the spatiotemporally resolved gas transfer velocity field in surface waters. We present an overview of our developed infrared quantitative imaging technique, our approach to calculating the gas transfer velocity, recent field measurements of gas transfer velocities and initial efforts at quantifying methane fluxes.

Primary Presenter: Edwin Cowen, Cornell University (eac20@cornell.edu)

Authors:

Edwin Cowen, Cornell University  (eac20@cornell.edu)

Seth Schweitzer, Cornell University  (seth.schweitzer@cornell.edu)

Evan Heberlein, Cornell University  (eth47@cornell.edu)