Climate Change and m2m: A Closer Look

 

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This highlighted industry intelligence from Beecham Research focuses on the intersection of climate change and M2M technologies, an intersection likely to grow substantially in the years ahead.

 

At the heart of this intersection is remote monitoring, with three primary missions:

  • Monitoring the effects of climate change;
  • Monitoring emissions to enable continual improvement of climate models and their predictive capabilities; and
  • Reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

 

Monitoring the Effects of Climate Change

 

Any effects of climate change are of obvious major concern to everyone. These include, but aren't limited to, temperature increases and related melting, flooding, rises in sea levels, changes in soil moisture, and so on.

Any such changes will impact human civilization in numerous ways; these effects must be monitored.

Existing M2M applications include monitoring ocean conditions, flood plains in the UK, and glaciers in Scandinavia, but these are the tiniest ice floes compared to future M2M application icebergs.

Should climate change fulfill predictions, these applications can only increase.

 

Monitoring Emissions to Enable Continual Improvement of Climate models and Their Predictive Capabilities


Some emission monitoring is already mandated for large companies in smokestack industries while monitoring for regulatory compliance is likely to become a huge future application, given the present political climate.

Global warming is not without skeptics, whether of warming itself, the primacy of man-made causes, or of the effectiveness of efforts to reduce it. Considering the costs, some skepticism is justified.

Few, however, would disagree that continually improved climate models are called for, and the data for creating these is acquired by monitoring.

The Mauna Loa lab, part of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory's Global Monitoring Division, uses a Non-Dispersive Infrared Analyzer (NDIR) to monitor the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere.

This is a complex piece of equipment and GMD has a number of NDIRs in various locations, even Siberia. Variations are used to monitor smokestack emissions.

Mauna Loa's NDIR requires careful calibration every time it's used; the same isn't true of mass produced (and much smaller) carbon dioxide sensors used for various indoor applications.

These aren't presently as sensitive as their larger and more complex cousins, but it's not difficult to imagine suitable modifications and huge sensor networks attached to M2M satellite modules in the not-too-distant future.

Meanwhile, scientists tasked with carbon tracking for improving climate models must rely on a mixture of technologies and techniques.

These vary depending on the fossil fuel -- coal, gas, or oil -- and include actual monitoring (coal) and metering (gas) in addition to careful estimates, but there are problems with a major source of emissions: Cars and trucks.

The amount of fuel consumed and carbon dioxide emitted can be estimated, based on traffic and EPA numbers, but cars and trucks in the countryside create a far different situation than those within urban and metropolitan regions. In the countryside, plants and trees absorb carbon dioxide; this is not the case in more congested areas.

Various strategies are employed to deal with this, but nothing would be better than actual sensors in exhaust pipes, connected to telematic systems. Here is one huge M2M application.

Of course not all greenhouse gas emissions are generated by human activity; termites, for example, emit atmospheric methane, a gas far worse than carbon dioxide in terms of the greenhouse effect. Climatic modeling must include the monitoring of various natural sources of greenhouse gases, too, and in remote areas. If this is done on a wide scale, using M2M technologies is one way to bring costs down.

 

Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions


Reducing greenhouse gas emissions can't be separated from energy conservation; burn less fossil fuel and emissions are reduced -- even as energy conservation can't be separated from increasingly high fuel costs.

Here, the advantages of present M2M applications are obvious, whether fleet management, automatic metering, or any application contributing to energy conservation, but what about all of the carbon trading schemes being enacted around the planet?

Their effectiveness is already being questioned even as new versions are debated.

Massive monitoring is likely to be one way to answer these questions. Governments and climatologists should increasingly turn to the providers of monitoring services, M2M companies.

Bill Ingle

Beecham Research

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