Luca McGill
8th Grade, Emily Gray Junior High School
Tucson, AZ
ALTO-CO鈧�: Low-Cost Drone-Based Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Monitoring Across Urban, Suburban, and Rural Areas in Southern Arizona
Project Background
Luca likes to play outdoor sports, but in Arizona, it鈥檚 not always safe. There can be intense heat, dust storms and bad air quality during wildfire season. 鈥淪ometimes Tucson has warnings about bad air, but it鈥檚 hard to know how accurate they are for different places or times of day,鈥� Luca says. 鈥淲hen I visit my grandparents in Germany every summer, I鈥檝e noticed air quality is monitored more closely.鈥� He wondered if he could use a drone to better monitor air quality in Arizona.
Tactics and Results
Luca decided to monitor carbon dioxide levels at different altitudes in urban, rural and suburban environments. He equipped his DJI Mini 2 drone with a CO鈧� sensor and a Raspberry Pi. Then he flew his drone carefully along the same vertical path in an urban, suburban and rural area on Sundays. The drone hovered every 15 meters from the ground up to 120 meters. He also kept track of nearby traffic and weather patterns. Luca thought that urban environments would have the highest CO鈧� near the ground, due to traffic. But his measures showed that rural areas had the highest CO鈧� close to the ground, while urban areas had even levels of CO鈧� across altitudes. Suburban areas, he showed, had high CO鈧� at both high and low altitudes, with a dip in the middle. The method, Luca says, shows a low-cost way to provide more detailed CO鈧� data.
Beyond the Project
Luca is a second-degree black belt in the Korean martial art Dang Soo Do and helps out as an assistant instructor. 鈥淚 love the physical challenge, but what I enjoy most is teaching younger students and giving back to the community that taught me,鈥� he says. He also volunteers as a junior handler in training with the Alliance of Therapy Dogs, taking his family鈥檚 certified therapy dog to senior homes, hospitals and more. Luca would like to be a climatologist. 鈥淐limate change is one of the biggest challenges of our time, and I want to help solve it.鈥�
