Methane (CH
4) is a greenhouse gas and CH
4 concentration of the air has been increasing every year at a rate of about 1%. Plant ecosystems act as both a source and a sink of atmospheric methane, but there have been some difficulties in determining the actual CH
4 flux over each type of vegetation because a proper gas analyzer had never been available. We developed a movable infrared methane (NDIR-CH
4) analyzer for field measurements. The analyzer can be applied to field measurements, and has a 10ppm realizable limit and good reproducibility by using both a cross-modulation type of NDIR analyzing system and a pre-processing unit with a selective caalyzer.
The analyzer was applied to measurement of the CH
4 concentration and its flux over grasslands. The CH
4 gradient was measured by alternately sampling air from two different heights. The CH
4 concentration gradient over the dry grassland was positive meaning that is a CH
4 sink, and gradient was negative over the pasture-land at night time where cattle excrement had been spread. Continuous measurement showed that CH
4 concentrations changed remarkably over the pasture-land when the CH
4 enriched parcel advected from source points such as excrement near cattle sheds.
CH
4 flux was evaluated micro-meteorologically using CO
2 flux data obtained by the eddy correlation technique. There was an efflux (source) of 0.1-0.3mg CH
4/m
2h over the pastureland during night time, while it was 0.1-0.3mgCH
4/m
2h of downward flux (sink) in the morning. These levels of sink were higher than previous results which were obtained by the chamber method. The performance of the present NDIR-CH
4 analyzer was confirmed by field tests over grasslands. Thus, the analyzer is useful for studying the characteristics of CH
4 in ecosystems.
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