Luca McGill
8th Grade, Emily Gray Junior High School
Tucson, AZ
ALTO-CO₂: Low-Cost Drone-Based Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Monitoring Across Urban, Suburban, and Rural Areas in Southern Arizona
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Project Background
Luca likes to play outdoor sports, but in Arizona, it’s not always safe. There can be intense heat, dust storms and bad air quality during wildfire season. “Sometimes Tucson has warnings about bad air, but it’s hard to know how accurate they are for different places or times of day,” Luca says. “When I visit my grandparents in Germany every summer, I’ve noticed air quality is monitored more closely.” 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 CO₂ 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 CO₂ near the ground, due to traffic. But his measures showed that rural areas had the highest CO₂ close to the ground, while urban areas had even levels of CO₂ across altitudes. Suburban areas, he showed, had high CO₂ 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 CO₂ 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. “I love the physical challenge, but what I enjoy most is teaching younger students and giving back to the community that taught me,” he says. He also volunteers as a junior handler in training with the Alliance of Therapy Dogs, taking his family’s certified therapy dog to senior homes, hospitals and more. Luca would like to be a climatologist. “Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our time, and I want to help solve it.”
