Diamond and diamond-like carbon have properties which in principle make them ideally suited to a wide variety of thin-film applications. The widespread use of diamond thin films, however, has been limited for a number of reasons related largely to the lack of understanding and control of the nucleation and growth processes. Real-time, in-situ studies of the surface of the growing diamond film are experimentally difficult because these films are normally grown under a relatively high pressure of hydrogen, and conventional surface analytical methods require an ultrahigh vacuum environment. Pulsed ion beam based analytical methods with differentially pumped ion sources and particle detectors are able to characterize the uppermost atomic layer of a film during growth at ambient pressures in the range 0.7-27 Pa (4-6 orders of magnitude higher than other surface-specific analytical methods). We describe here a system which has been developed for the purpose of determining the hydrogen concentration and bonding sites on diamond surfaces as a function of sample temperature and ambient hydrogen pressure under hot-filament chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth conditions. It is demonstrated that as the hydrogen partial pressure increases the saturation hydrogen coverage of the surface of a CVD diamond film increases, but that the saturation level depends on the atomic hydrogen concentration and substrate temperature. At the highest temperatures studied (700 degrees C), it was found that the surface hydrogen concentration did not exceed 1/4 monolayer.