An Airborne Integrated System to Monitor CO2 Emissions – Preliminary Results in the Adriatic Seashore

CO2 emissions monitoring is one of the rising problems in a CO2 underground storage site. In this framework OGS has tested a simple methodology addressed to control the hypothetic CO2 emissions from an underground storage facility by direct airborne measurements. The study also investigates the economical aspects of such an activity. The test has been carried out using a low cost single engine IFR certified aircraft where an air sampling system, able to measure the CO2 concentration in the air, has been mounted on; a pseudo regular flight pattern has been adopted at an altitude of 2000 ft above the studied area, located in the North Eastern part of the Adriatic seashore and including some small dimension towns. In real time the system collected the position of the aircraft, the air pressure, temperature, relative humidity, wind direction and CO2 concentration values. A specific approach for data reduction to a "datum" altitude has been investigated and successfully applied. The trend of anthropic CO2 concentration has been studied, as the base for the computation of a first primitive diffusive model of CO2 flux in the air and nearby the ground. The test demonstrated the feasibility of the method.