24/7 Monitoring of soil gas pCO₂ concentrations in large scale ERW experiments with low cost electronics

Our new pCO2 monitoring paper documents our soil gas sensors and compares our data with the alkalinity data for CDR from our previous publication.

In our endeavor to measure the climate relevant effects of rock weathering in agriculture we have been setting up several field and greenhouse experiments over the last three years. During this work we started experimenting with low cost electronic sensors in 2022 with the goal to monitor the soil gas CO₂ concentration (pCO₂) in our enhanced rock weathering (ERW) experiments, mainly in lysimeters in fields and greenhouses. 

In this article we document our latest sensor design which gives us reasonably good pCO₂ measurements as well as the steps that got us to this design. We furthermore share a preview of our pCO₂ data and compare these with the CDR estimates we recently derived from soil leachate alkalinity measurements.

Please visit our blog to read the full story and download the PDF report.