Picarro Blog

Picarro is proud to support important climate science. We are a partner of the DEEPICE project, an innovative training network in instrumentation, ice core analysis, and glaciological and climatic modelling. For their new European collaboration, we’re excited to support training schools and host an intern to assist in the development of analytical methods for ice core measurements that will answer key questions about the impact of large climate shifts on the Antarctic ice sheet.

High-precision trace gas measurements are required for a range of environmental research questions and for many industrial applications. However, hazardous, corrosive, and reactive gases can be difficult to trace, and the accuracy of standard gas concentrations can be unreliable. To solve this problem, Picarro has developed a method of surrogate gas validation for ammonia, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen peroxide, hydrogen fluoride, and formaldehyde.

To investigate how plant growth will be affected in the future, ecologists and plant biologists have setup Free-Air Carbon dioxide Enrichment (FACE) facilities in various ecosystems around the world that imitate elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. A Picarro G2508 is being used at a FACE facility in Germany to investigate the response of a semi-natural grassland to changing environmental conditions.

Google “Laser-Based Diagnostics of Diamond Synthesis Reactors” and one of the first things you’ll see is Ed Wahl’s Stanford PhD thesis from 2001. Back then he was applying Cavity Ring-Down Spectroscopy (CRDS) to measure absolute CH3 and CH radical concentrations and temperatures in a hot-filament CVD (HFCVD) reactor. Today, he’s

Hydrogen peroxide has a long history as a pharmaceutical sterilizer at high concentrations, and the claim by these manufacturers is that extremely low levels of hydrogen peroxide (10-20ppb or 0.01ppm) will attract and kill viral particles while not impacting human health. Instead of just treating air as it returns, these solutions seek to keep a constant low level of hydrogen peroxide in all habitable areas of a building.

Gas operators are increasingly being challenged to reduce methane emissions, and to do so in a continuous, verifiable way. This challenge at its most extreme has some cities recently banning natural gas in new construction. Further, as the infrastructure ages, gas operators face challenges in managing budgets and unplanned work due to an accelerating rate of growth in the number of leaks emerging from leak-prone pipe. These pressures are driving the need to manage gas assets as cost-effectively as possible.

September 16 is World Ozone Day. This year celebrates 35 years of the Vienna Convention and 35 years of global ozone layer protection. In honor of World Ozone Day, we’re taking a look back over the last decade at some of the important work customers all over the world have done using our gas analyzers to measure greenhouse gases in support of ozone research.

In the battle against infectious disease, sterilization of medical instrumentation is one of the most important steps to keeping patients safe. Various methods are used in modern hospitals to sterilize equipment, from steam sterilization to hydrogen peroxide.

Developing a regulatory and industrial mitigation response to ethylene oxide emissions (C2H4O / EtO) poses a centuries old scientific challenge – how do we fix a problem that we cannot measure? The understanding of infectious agents has come a long way since Ignaz Semmelweis first introduced, in 1850, the practice

One of our most popular pairings for a fully integrated soil flux measurement solution is Picarro’s G2000 series analyzers with Eosense’s eosAC Flux Chamber and eosMX Multiplexer. In this application, we see how our G2508 greenhouse gas analyzer is used with Eosense’s eosAC automated chambers and a modified, insulated enclosure for continuous measurements in periodically inundated fields. We’d like to thank Dr. Whendee L. Silver, Ph.D. candidate Tyler L. Anthony, and the Ecosystem Science Division team at University of California, Berkeley, USA for their contributions in this deployment. Enjoy!

Tree methane (aka ‘Treethane’) emissions have been referred to as 'a new frontier in the global carbon cycle', (Barba et al., 2019) representing a field that is gaining rapid research momentum. Whilst this line of research is now my primary focus, it wasn’t always that way...

The year was 2008. The second wave of therapeutic biological products was just around the corner. By now it was known that many of these products were susceptible to oxidative damage by residual hydrogen peroxide left over after aeration of the aseptic processing equipment and barrier system. How sensitive these products were to low concentrations of residual hydrogen peroxide was difficult to assess because there were no obvious measurement systems capable of quickly, accurately and precisely measuring vapor phase hydrogen peroxide below a few hundred parts per billion (ppb).

The most effective and valuable new therapeutic products today are biologics, including peptides, proteins, and antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), as well as cells, cell-derived products, and gene therapies. Many of these products are susceptible to oxidative damage by trace levels of hydrogen peroxide.

The hydrogen and oxygen isotopic composition of rainfall is influenced by a variety of climatic factors such as air temperature, amount and origin of precipitation.

Anyone who has watched a hummingbird frantically sip from a flower or feeder can appreciate how beautiful, hyperactive, and hungry these tiny birds are. It often seems that they are constantly on the move, fiendishly searching for and defending the flowers that contain the sugary nectar they depend on.

From the Arctic tundra to the tropics of Mexico, from Los Angeles to Long Island, Stephen Conley and the pilots and scientists at Scientific Aviation have tracked and measured air pollution throughout North America using their fleet of light aircraft.

In this second part of the 2-part blog series on Real-Time Indoor Air Measurements of Ammonia, we present a short summary of House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry (HOMEChem), part of the Indoor Chem Project (https://indoorchem.org/). Enjoy!

In part 1 of this blog series, we explore how iCHEAR used a Picarro G2103 analyzer to provide real-time measurements of ammonia emissions to separate the contribution of exhaled and dermally emitted pollutants. What proportion of human emissions do you think can be measured and what proportion remain “missing”? Read on.

There are not many countries in the world left where you can truly say that they are blessed with intact native tropical forests. Of course we all know about the Amazon, but if we have a closer look it becomes clear that even the ‘Green hell’ as the Amazon basin has been labelled, is heavily affected by humans.

In the following video series of 6 episodes, Eosense walks us through the pairing process using a G2508 five species, gas concentration analyzer with their eosAC soil flux chamber and gives a demonstration on how to process, analyze and export the data using their software.