Study on Local Power Plant Emissions Using Multi-Frequency Differential Absorption LIDAR and Real-Time Plume Tracking

Abstract

We present a new fiber-amplifier-based differential absorption light detection and ranging (DIAL) system for range-resolved detection of carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapor (H2O) over a range of a few kilometers. The fiber amplifier chain is seeded with a 7.14 kHz fast-switching high-spectral purity wavelength source near 1572 nm to cover ten different frequencies across the CO2/H2O line pair in ≈1.4 ms. We demonstrate the system in a study of CO2 emissions from a local power plant in Boulder, CO, USA. We use real-time wind information to predict the plume location for tracking and modeling of the CO2 emission rate to compare with the reported data from the power plant over a 13 h period. There is overall agreement with the reported burn rate, but we see periods of bias towards underestimation of the CO2 emission rate. We attribute the dropout periods to uncertainties between the measured and the plant’s local wind speed data that impact both the tracking location and the plume model predictions. Upcoming studies that will make use of real-time Doppler wind data are expected to significantly decrease these uncertainties.