Cavity Enhanced Absorption Spectroscopy (CEAS) for Ozone Detection

Engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center tasked with measuring atmospheric Ozone, an important pollutant and greenhouse gas, quickly discovered that existing optical instrumentation would not be sufficient to achieve their performance requirements. Specifically, the current systems did not possess the precision necessary to make low concentration measurements at fast time resolution. This innovation utilizes Cavity Enhanced Absorption Spectroscopy (CEAS) with a simple and inexpensive optical and electrical design to overcome these limitations and achieve high quality Ozone measurements. The sensitivity of the instrument developed using CEAS exceeds that of commercially available instrumentations, and matches performance of complex chemiluminescence instruments.