Development of Light Weight Optical Counter Gas Measurement

The Earth's climate system consists of five interacting components namely atmosphere, hydrosphere, surface, biosphere and cryosphere, and influenced by various external forcing mechanisms. The most unstable component of the Earth's climate system is 'atmosphere's which has undergone significant changes since the evolution of the Earth (Baede et al., 2001). The present-day Earth's atmosphere is primarily composed of Nitrogen (78.08% by volume), Oxygen (20.95% by volume) and Ar (0.93% by volume). These gases do not interact with the incoming solar and outgoing terrestrial radiation significantly enough to alter the Earth's radiation balance. Water vapor (although variable, but typical volume mixing ratio is ~1%) and some gases like CO2, O3, CH4 etc. (famously known as 'Greenhouse Gases',