Rarely does a month go by without another major meat recall. In this case, the meat in question was shipped from Italy to Canada and contained dangerous levels of Lysteria bacteria.  And it was cooked, not raw, meat. We hope that no one gets…

The Malaspina Expedition may set the record for the most well-travelled Picarro analyzer. And we can't wait to see the science that emerges from this fascinating voyage. Here's the story. The research voyage marks the 200 Year Anniversary of the death of Alessandro Malaspina in 1810. Malaspina directed the first…

We just launched a new Food Tracebility and Food Safety mini-site and our timing sadly coincided with a tragedy in this arena. As the unfolding details of the horrible E.coli outbreak in Europe have highlighted, everything is…

The greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO₂) is a product of human activities that use carbon-based fuels, such as home heating, cars, and manufacturing plants, to name a few. But CO₂ also has many natural sources, such as soil, volcanoes and all living things that breathe. So a necessary question that should be asked by climate and citizen scientists alike is, “How do you…

Climate scientists can be divided into two large interactive groups: Experimentalists, who go out into the world and collect climate data (e.g., levels of carbon dioxide, methane concentration, seasonal temperature, snowfall rates, etc.); and Modelers, those who build computer simulations based on that data (called “climate models” by those in the know) to estimate how climate variables…

I've got two simple yet evocative phrases  for you. Wing pods. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Excited? We are. During late June, a team of top scientists from the NASA Ames Research Center deployed three Picarro analyzers as part of the The Railroad Valley Vicarious Calibration Campaign, a collaboration between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and NASA's Jet Propulsion…

As I write this, I’m sitting on a ski-equipped LC-130 Hercules cargo plane from the New York Air National Guard’s 109^th Airlift Wing, flying over Greenland, having just taken off from the NEEM camp at 77°N latitude where the sun is up 24 hours a day. I was fortunate enough to be invited to…

In a week when heat waves are sweeping the country, a post about green roofs seems appropriate. Environmentalists have long espoused putting plants on top of buildings as a way to improve air quality in cities and reduce the urban island heat effect. Sounds nice, but what are the real impacts of green roofs? Will they reduce runoff water into storm drains? Will they clean the runoff water?…

I've written a bit about using Picarro's Combustion Module for novel application methods and I wanted to let you know about a brand new product we are releasing - This is a CRDS analyzer that simultaneously measures stable isotope ratios of both carbon and its bound hydrogen directly from a combustion front-end. We're confident this new system is a significant advancement in capabilities…

In conversations with stable isotope researchers around the world a recurrent theme has been the problems caused by organics compounds in water samples, ranging from plant water extracts to alcoholic beverages.  For laser-based spectroscopic analyzers like Picarro, certain organic compounds, mostly alcohols, have caused spectral interference which distorted the reported isotope ratio.…

Prior to Picarro, I was on the academic path. I completed my PhD under the supervision of a brilliant scientist, then scored a post-doc position with a highly regarded researcher doing cutting-edge work that gained attention from the press (and also happened to be in Hawaii). But I rapidly discovered that I was not too gaga about the academic life. The grant writing process and being…

Editor’s note: This post comes to us from Benoit Wastine from the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement (LSCE/IPSL) CEA-CNRS-UVSQ in France.  http://www.lsce.ipsl.fr/en/

It’s been four years now that I’ve been working with Picarro instruments for greenhouse gas (GHG) measurements. Four years of fruitful…

When I joined Picarro at the start of September in 2009, Cavity Ring-Down Spectroscopy technology for isotope analysis had only just been created. In short order CRDS was validated by researchers whose laboratories specialized in using isotope ratio mass spectrometers (IRMS), devices which were previously considered the…

Hi, there. I'm Kevin Cunningham and I am the product manager for isotopic carbon analyzers at Picarro. I got my PhD in laser spectroscopy (but don't hold that against me) so it has been thrilling to work at Picarro where laser spectroscopy has been applied to so many other fields. And, you may have noticed, we have been announcing some fantastic innovations lately and now its my turn. The…

When isotopes are mentioned in the same breath as law enforcement, the first thought that comes to mind is likely an atomic weapons-based attack using radioactive isotopes and what security forces can do to prevent it. That’s certainly the most publicized association between these words. However, it must be kept in mind that there are two kinds of isotopes: the…

It seems such a short time ago that Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) was expanded and enacted through Title XI of the Farm Bill 2008. Yet legislators have already started the committee meetings and town hall discussions that are framing the early debates on Farm Bill 2012. COOL was intended as a step forward to improve consumers’ ability of to make rational choices of the origin of their…

Greetings, Picarro Community!   My name is Jeff Forgeron, and I am a meteorology major at San Jose State University. I am currently interning for Picarro, and was recently asked to design and implement a weather station on the rooftop using an All-In-One Climatronics instrument. We have been using both the Picarro methane, acetylene…

The following is a transcript of my comments at the Nov 2^nd 2011 Stakeholders Meeting set up by The Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) at the behest of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in compliance with…

During a speech on Food Safety¹, Michael Taylor, Deputy Commissioner for Foods for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) discussed the benefits of Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point programs – HACCP.

HACCP is a core part of the prevention processes in the food and pharmaceutical industries. HACCP provides a methodology for identifying, characterizing and…

Bravo to CNN for a thought provoking program on cocoa farm child labor in the Ivory Coast. The missing component from the discussion is that there is a solution that would go much further than the current crop of toothless fair trade ‘certifications’. Stable…

Over the past few months, I’ve had the privilege of working with collaborators from Penn State, Climmod, Sigma Space, NOAA and others to demonstrate the power of using high precision instruments coupled with advanced modeling techniques to measure greenhouse gas emissions in cities. While many cities are taking a step in the right direction by volunteering to report their emissions…

Link to CityCarbon website showing current emissions in Davos

(hover over graph to the right for explanation)

02 February, 2012 Summary of Results

By combining concentration data from Picarro instruments with atmospheric modeling by Penn State and Climmod, we have measured…

In my role as an Applications Scientist here at Picarro, I’m always getting questions from customers like, “So what’s new?” and “What new technology breakthroughs are you guys working on?” To better address these questions, I spoke with Picarro Senior System Engineer Dr. Yonggang He about the recent technology innovations that have enabled us to boost the performance of our isotopic carbon…

It's commonly said here at Picarro that our customers have more interesting lives than we do -- we're always receiving fantastic photos of someone with one of our instruments in some remote and often idyllic field location. We thought it would be fun to periodically share some of the amazing locations where our customers are doing field work. Here are the five that we've come up with this…

The Centre for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark is one of the birthplaces of ice core science.  In 1954 Willi Dansgaard [1] suggested the correlation between the oxygen isotope ratio and temperature at which the precipitation was formed and postulated that past climate changes could be discerned by such measurements. Ten years later, in 1964, Willi Dansgaard…

Methane and City Carbon^TM have become buzzwords here at Picarro. Surely anyone familiar with carbon emissions and climate change knows that methane is a potent greenhouse gas and most emissions originate from cities. Nevertheless, I’ll bet most people would be shocked by the…

An instrument near the summit of Mauna Loa in Hawaii has recorded a climate milestone: the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere there has exceeded 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in 55 years of measurement—and probably more than 3 million years of Earth history.

While we, at Picarro, take a certain amount of pride in the instrument used to…

The embedded video, produced by Marsha Walton and reported by Miles O'Brien, describes how University of Colorado meteorologist David Noone and his team are working to understand how water moves around the planet. According to the accompanying article, "The measurements are made using an optical measurement technology which has only recently become available, and…

Gloria Jacobson, Picarro product manager for greenhouse gas analyzers, has been very busy lately. As the picture shows, she has been testing products in nearby marsh lands. In addition, she has discussed field tests with independent scientists, and attended several conferences in the U.S. and China. Over the next few weeks, she will be sharing her insights through a series of blog…