I am just starting to sort through the data we collected in Rio Branco. 24 pages of notes like this listing conditions during field monitoring of soil mercury emissions at various sites, during different times of day, and before/after the fire (my field notebook still smells like smoke). Over the next few weeks I hope to match the conditions recorded in the notebook with the results recorded by our instrument to get a sense of soil mercury emissions pre- vs. post-burn. The one tricky thing is the instrument we were using. The loaner we managed to scrounge up at the last minute had its problems. Unfortunately the baseline on the instrument continued to drift downward over the course of each day.
The peaks and valleys in this data represent mercury concentrations going into and out of our chamber, which allows me to calculate the emissions of mercury from the soil surface. However, the slow downward trend in the data, emphasized by the blackline, is due to instrument drift. I should be able to subtract that out, but I will have to get one of my statistics friends involved just to be safe.
I am just starting to sort through the data we collected in Rio Branco. 24 pages of notes like this listing conditions during field monitoring of soil mercury emissions at various sites, during different times of day, and before/after the fire (my field notebook still smells like smoke). Over the next few weeks I hope to match the conditions recorded in the notebook with the results recorded by our instrument to get a sense of soil mercury emissions pre- vs. post-burn. The one tricky thing is the instrument we were using. The loaner we managed to scrounge up at the last minute had its problems. Unfortunately the baseline on the instrument continued to drift downward over the course of each day.
The peaks and valleys in this data represent mercury concentrations going into and out of our chamber, which allows me to calculate the emissions of mercury from the soil surface. However, the slow downward trend in the data, emphasized by the blackline, is due to instrument drift. I should be able to subtract that out, but I will have to get one of my statistics friends involved just to be safe.
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