Unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with sensor packages to study spatiotemporal variations of air pollutants in industry parks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with a miniaturized sensor package were developed for aerial observations, which realizes aerial observations affordable to scientists in atmospheric science and achieves aerial measurements in high spatial resolution. UAVs are deployed to a variety of aerial detecting tasks in different scientific scenarios including chemical industry parks (CIPs) with hazardous gases emissions, and some places difficult for humans to reach. In this study, UAV sensing technology was deployed to detect air pollutants in a suburb, a CIP and a natural gas plant, respectively. The effects of atmospheric conditions such as the atmospheric boundary layer height, long-distance transport and atmospheric stability on the spatiotemporal variations of the air pollutants vertical profiles were investigated by the UAV. The UAV with the sensor package was deployed to capture the methane (CH₄) leakages in a natural gas plant. The spatiotemporal variations of CH₄ in both vertical and horizontal directions studied by UAV were employed to calculate accurate CH₄ emissions, which is crucial to reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases. The low-cost UAV sensing technology for air pollutants was developed by Dr. Xiaobing Pang, who was funded by the Newton Fellowship in 2009 and worked in the University of York. This article is part of the theme issue 'Celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Royal Society Newton International Fellowship'.