What are the refineries burning in those flares?  How often are the big flares occurring?  How often is black smoke and soot being discharged?  Is it making particles in the air that I breathe?  We will answer these questions by installing equipment to remotely measure refinery flares twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.  This project will develop an inexpensive, easy to construct, and reliable observation station to provide usable data in order to answer these questions.

A camera pointed at the flare in combination with a remote sensor that measures the infrared temperature will allow the detection of big flare events and trigger a time stamp.  Thus the events can be detected and documented.  

PublicLab.org developed an inexpensive spectrometer that will be used to attempt to identify the chemicals that are being burned in the flare.  A spectrometer spreads out the light like a rainbow allowing the chemical composition of the flame to be determined.  An inexpensive dust sensor will also be used to see if there is a measurable amount of dust that can be attributed to the flare.  All of this equipment will be controlled by a Raspberry Pi computer connected to the Internet.  The collected data will be posted to a web site so that it will be freely available and can be analysed by the public. 

The first station does not have Internet connectivity so a cell phone hot spot will be necessary.  Subsequent stations should not need this expensive device since DSL or WiFi will likely be available.