Building and Programming a High School CO2 Monitoring System

A high school meteorology program, either as part of the curriculum or as a club, provides for the exploration of a wide ranging curriculum and the development of a multitude of skills. The emphasis of this project was on building and programming a CO2 monitor.

Morristown-Beard Weather Services (MBWS) was in possession of a Li-Cor CO2 monitor that it had not used for years. Students of MBWS found the old monitor and decided they wanted to “bring it back to life”. This was made more challenging by the fact that the monitor had not been properly serviced or calibrated for a long time and the software used to access and present the data from the monitor no longer worked on any computer hardware the school had.

This did not stop the students.

After contacting Li-Cor, students were able to get the monitor working and calibrated. Then they wrote code to directly access the raw data off of the Li-Cor and stored it on a local server. A method was developed to store data from on-campus locations that allowed for off-campus access and respected the school’s firewalls. Finally, a data display program was written to clearly share the data with the school community.

Mobility and “remoteness” allows for a wide range of experiments to be performed. It is hoped that some of these experiments will be completed in time to be shared at the AMS Annual Meeting.