Monitoring The On-Site Contribution To The Greenhouse Effect By Distributed Measurement Of Carbon Dioxide

Global warming is one of the most important issues of the last few decades. Among other gases with greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide has one of the largest contributions to global warming. To estimate its footprint upon the environment, usually it is measured in fixed stations, located near the industrial processes which are the source for this gas. The amount of carbon dioxide produced by natural phenomena or small daily activities is difficult to assess. The paper proposes a cooperative measurement of carbon dioxide along with other environment factors, made with low-power electronic sensors, ad-hoc connected via Bluetooth to mobile phones. The sensor devices are small, portable and can be detected by the mobile phone only at short distance. The devices broadcast the temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, light intensity and carbon dioxide concentration values in a non-connectable advertising mode, in order to lower the power consumption. The environmental values are continuously updated. The mobile phone is used as relays for the sensors, due to their almost global connectivity. On the phone an application can display the data read from the sensors and can send the values to a server after adding the GPS coordinates. On the server a web based application can display on maps all the information about the greenhouse effect gas concentration and can warn if high concentrations are detected.