Some might say that Dr. Gunnar Schade, assistant professor of Atmospheric Sciences in the College of Geosciences, is getting a free ride from Yellow Cab in Houston. The company is making a unique contribution to air quality control research by allowing Schade to use its 300-foot tall communications tower at no charge. Schade has installed sensitive instruments that measure surface winds and concentrations of air pollutants on the tower. This research will be applied to air quality questions important to Houston and the State of Texas.

In order to obtain accurate measurements, we needed to mount these instruments on a structure that does not influence the wind itself. A free standing tower, with its small footprint and lattice structure, is just that,” explained Dr. Schade. But the search for a tower whose owner was willing to host the instruments at no cost was futile until Dr. Schade approached Yellow Cab.

Besides meteorological data, long Teflon tubes on the tower sample the air, which is then analyzed with instruments housed in a building at the bottom of the tower on the Yellow Cab property. “The donation of the space is an essential ingredient to our success. We cannot afford to pay rent on a commercial tower,” Dr. Schade said. The location of the facilities and tower, only 2.5 miles north of downtown, is near ideal for measuring air emissions from traffic and from such diverse areas of Houston including residential, commercial and recreational.

Weather and air quality conditions measured at the tower can be viewed at this webpage, which is updated every 20 minutes: http://www.met.tamu.edu/yellowcabweather. The study is conducted with partial funding from the Texas Air Research Center at Lamar University and the EPA. Two graduate students and several undergraduate students work on projects connected to the measurements taken on the tower.

“Yellow Cab is recognized as an industry leader in the innovative use of technology,” said Robert Rugg, president of Greater Houston Transportation Company. “This project is especially exciting because we are in a unique position to allow our technology and infrastructure to benefit scientific research and the City of Houston in a meaningful way.”

The study’s main goals are to measure turbulent air mass exchange and energy and trace gas fluxes (i.e. emission amounts in most cases) from the urban surface in this region. “We are providing crucial input data for people who model air pollution in Texas,” said Dr. Schade. “Our measurements can provide an independent validation of the state’s pollutant emissions’ inventory and thereby contributes to efforts bringing Houston into compliance with the National Ambient Air Quality Standards.