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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> The EPA said that the potential area is too broad and the satellite data “does not provide enough tangible information of potential sources in which to conduct a programmatic review,”

Perhaps we should have airplanes/drones fitted with similar measurement instruments as the satellite, so we can take a closer look when necessary?

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I believe that's become standard practice in the last few years. For example: https://www.microdrones.com/en/integrated-systems/ge-industr... or https://kairosaerospace.com/methane-detection/

The company Aclima (https://www.aclima.io/) has a commercial business in which they pay drivers to drive around and collect air quality data, including methane concentration. Originally they co-located the sensors on the Google StreetMap vehicles, but now they run their own fleet. I don't think they've made it out to rural Alabama quite yet, though. . .

High-Resolution Air Pollution Mapping with Google Street View Cars: Exploiting Big Data https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b00891

Or just people driving around with a bike and a detector? 7 km x 7 km might take a while but it should be possible within a few days?

Sounds like EPA is either too lazy or they're trying to conceal something.

Has anyone made a generic "I am willing to carry one or more sensors on my bicycle, and criss-cross an area as long as software tells me where I need to go next" app that we can all use to congregate sensor readings with?

Methane, decibel levels, all sorts of opportunities here.

Airliners gather some air measurements, at least CO2. Don't know how widely:

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atot/25/10/2008jt...

https://newsroom.usra.edu/commercial-airliners-monitoring-ca...

Airline routes are not sampling evenly though, and flying at 10 km height means ground level resolution is very very low.

I worked on a project called Bikenet at Dartmouth College that used bicycles for sensing carbon dioxide:

https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sensorlab/pubs/BikeNet-SenSys0...

http://sensorlab.cs.dartmouth.edu/pubs/a6-eisenman.pdf

We tried measuring carbon monoxide also but CO is lighter than air so we got no measurements. Methane is also lighter than air and would probably not be measurable on the ground unless you were very close to the source. However, the biker could carry a drone with a methane sensor and launch it periodically:

https://www.ravanair.com/drone-uav-methane-gas-detection/

Maybe a laser could be mounted on the bike firing straight up and be used to detect methane?:

https://www.crowcon.com/products/portables/lmm-gen-2/

I wanted to add radiation sensors to the bikes but the prof vetoed that idea, afraid it might affect property values in the town if we actually found differences in radiation levels.

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