Abstract. Recent advances in laser spectrometry offer new opportunities to investigate soil-atmosphere exchange of nitrous oxide. During two field campaigns conducted at a grassland site and a willow field, we tested the performance of a quantum cascade laser (QCL) connected to a newly developed automated chamber system against a conventional gas chromatography (GC) approach using the same chambers plus an automated gas sampling unit with septum capped vials and subsequent laboratory GC analysis. Through its high precision and time resolution, data of the QCL system were used for quantifying the commonly observed non-linearity in concentration changes during chamber deployment, making the calculation of exchange fluxes more accurate by the application of exponential models. As expected, the curvature in the concentration increase was higher during long (60 min) chamber closure times and under high flux conditions (FN2O > 150 µg N m−2 h−1) than those that were found when chambers were closed for only 10 min and/or fluxes were in a typical range of 2 to 50 µg N m−2 h−1. Extremely low standard errors of fluxes, i.e. ~0.1 % of the flux value, were observed regardless of linear or exponential flux calculation when using QCL data. Thus, we recommend reducing chamber closure times to a maximum of 10 min when high-frequency measurements are available to keep soil disturbance low and conditions around the chamber plot as natural as possible. If instrumentation with high-frequency resolution is available, sampling times from 1 to 5 s proved to be sufficient for robust flux determination assuring standard errors of N2O fluxes still being on a relatively low level. Despite low signal to noise ratios, GC was still found to be a useful method to determine soil-atmosphere exchange of N2O at longer time scales, i.e. seasons to years, e.g., when the main focus of the study is to investigate site budgets. Intriguingly, the consistency between GC and QCL-based campaign averages was better under low than under high N2O efflux conditions, although single flux values were highly scattered during the low efflux campaign. Furthermore, the QCL technology provides a useful tool to accurately investigate the highly debated topic of diurnal courses of N2O fluxes and its controlling factors. Our new chamber design reduces the disturbance of the soil and complies with high quality requirements of long-term observation studies and research infrastructures.
Free-space optical data link using Peltier-cooled quantum cascade laser
