Abstract

A prototype off-axis integrated cavity output spectrometer (OA-ICOS) utilizing two identical cavities together with a near-infrared (1.63 μm) external cavity tunable diode laser is described. The two-cavity design—one for a reference gas and one for a sample gas—takes advantage of classical double-beam infrared spectrometer characteristics in reducing uncertainties due to laser scan or power instabilities and major temperature variations by a factor of three or better compared with a single-cavity scheme. This is the first OA-ICOS instrument designed to determine 13C/12C and 18O/16O ratios from CO2 rotation/vibration fine structure in three different combination bands. Preliminary results indicate that at 0.8 Hz a precision of 3.3 and 2.8 \\permil\\ is obtained for δ13C and δ18O, respectively, over a period of 10 h and a pure CO2 gas sample at 26 hPa. By averaging 100 spectra over a subset of the data, we achieved a precision of 1.6 and 0.8 \\permil\\ for δ13C and δ18O, respectively.

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