Picarro博客

Recognize this? You could take a picture like this in almost any lab around the world. Carefully taped on the front of a tremendously expensive, state of the art piece of equipment, a little rectangle of paper with the name and number of the person to call when the darn thing breaks. You can find these cards everywhere - in research institution, industrial plants, academic labs. Sometimes the card is yellowed with age, or covered with amendments, additional numbers, and notes on how to make the darn thing work.

This is a picture from one of our customers / collaborators, John Stix and fellow intrepid researchers from the Earth and Planetary Sciences Deparment at McGill University in Canada. We believe this is the first time anyone has driven a live, running anallyzer up and down a smoking volcano to capture gas concentration samples.

A fascinating question scientists have long entertained is why do most bats primarily choose to fly at night? And why have they evolved so heavily towards nocturnal activity? The strongest hypothesis about this related to predator avoidance. But no one knew exactly why.

We're in an interesting spot, providing instruments to such a wide variety of folks – we have thought leaders in the greenhouse gas and isotope world who have years of experience using and development their own instruments and measurement methods. On the other end, we have entering undergraduate students who find themselves in front of one of our analyzers – and being able to produce data with it with virtually no training, since the instruments are easy to use and reasonably inexpensive relative to earlier technology… and that’s a good thing, though there are caveats.

LLEIDA, SPAIN — Our lab performs isotopic water analysis with a Picarro L2120-i analyzer. Our principal application using the Picarro analyzer is the isotopic analysis of xylem water to identify variations in water source during its uptake from the soil. This is based on the fact that there is an evaporation gradient in the soil and as a result, water obtained from distinct depths has a distinct isotopic signal. We are using this principle in distinct contexts to resolve various questions...