Carbonyl oxides, or Criegee intermediates, are important transient species formed in the reactions of unsaturated hydrocarbons with ozone. Although direct detection of Criegee intermediates has recently been realized, the main atmospheric sink of Criegee intermediates remains unclear. We report ultraviolet absorption spectroscopic measurements of the lifetime of the simplest Criegee intermediate, CH2OO, at various relative humidity levels up to 85% at 298 kelvin. An extremely fast decay rate of CH2OO was observed at high humidity. The observed quadratic dependence of the decay rate on water concentration implied a predominant reaction with water dimer. On the basis of the water dimer equilibrium constant, the effective rate coefficient of the CH2OO + (H2O)2 reaction was determined to be 6.5 (±0.8) × 10(-12) cubic centimeters per second. This work would help modelers to better constrain the atmospheric concentrations of CH2OO.

The kinetics of the reaction of CH2OO with water vapor was measured directly with UV absorption at temperatures from 283 to 324 K. The observed CH2OO decay rate is second order with respect to the H2O concentration, indicating water dimer participates in the reaction. The rate coefficient of the CH2OO reaction with water dimer can be described by an Arrhenius expression k(T) = A exp(-Ea/RT) with an activation energy of -8.1 ± 0.6 kcal mol(-1) and k(298 K) = (7.4 ± 0.6) × 10(-12) cm(3) s(-1). Theoretical calculations yield a large negative temperature dependence consistent with the experimental results. The temperature dependence increases the effective loss rate for CH2OO by a factor of ~2.5 at 278 K and decreases by a factor of ~2 at 313 K relative to 298 K, suggesting that temperature is important for determining the impact of Criegee intermediate reactions with water in the atmosphere.

In this study, we performed ab initio calculations and obtained the bimolecular rate coefficients for the CH2OO/CH3CHOO reactions with H2O/(H2O)2. The energies were calculated with QCISD(T)/CBS//B3LYP/6-311+G(2d,2p) and the partition functions were estimated with anharmonic vibrational corrections by using the second order perturbation theory. Furthermore, we directly measured the rate of the CH2OO reaction with water vapor at high temperatures (348 and 358 K) to reveal the contribution of the water monomer in the CH2OO decay kinetics. We found that the theoretical rate coefficients reproduce the experimental results of CH2OO for a wide range of temperatures. For anti- (syn-) CH3CHOO, we obtained theoretical rate coefficients of 1.60 × 10(-11) (2.56 × 10(-14)) and 3.40 × 10(-14) (1.98 × 10(-19)) cm(3) s(-1) for water dimer and monomer reactions at room temperature. From the detailed analysis of the quantum chemistry and approximations for the thermochemistry calculations, we conclude that our calculated values would be within a factor of 3 of the correct values. Furthermore, at [H2O] = 1 × 10(17) to 5 × 10(17) cm(-3), we estimate that the effective first-order rate coefficients for CH2OO, anti- and syn-CH3CHOO reactions with water vapor will be ∼10(3), ∼10(4), and ∼10(1) s(-1), respectively. Thereby, for Criegee intermediates with a hydrogen atom on the same side as the terminal oxygen atom, the reaction with water vapor will likely dominate the removal processes of these CIs in the atmosphere.

The kinetics of the reaction of anti-CHCHOO with water vapor were investigated using transient UV absorption spectroscopy at temperatures from 288 to 328 K and 500 Torr. We found that both the water monomer and the water dimer react with anti-CHCHOO. The rate coefficients of the reaction of the water monomer and dimer with anti-CHCHOO at 298 K were determined to be (1.31 ± 0.26) × 10 cm s and (4.40 ± 0.29) × 10 cm s, respectively. Furthermore, for the water dimer reaction, we observed very large negative temperature dependence with an activation energy of -12.17 ± 0.66 kcal mol. On the other hand, the monomer reaction showed minimal temperature dependence with nearly zero activation energy. At atmospherically relevant humidity, in opposition to previous experiments conducted for CHOO in which water dimer reaction predominates at room temperature, for anti-CHCHOO, the water monomer reaction can contribute significantly (∼30% of the reaction with water vapor at relative humidity RH = 40% and 298 K). These results show that substitution of an alkyl group can greatly affect the reaction of Criegee intermediates with water vapor, especially changing the contributions of water monomer and dimer reactions.

The UV spectrum of CH3CHOO was measured by transient absorption in a flow cell at 295 K. The absolute absorption cross sections of CH3CHOO were measured by laser depletion in a molecular beam to be (1.06 ± 0.09) × 10(-17) cm(2) molecule(-1) at 308 nm and (9.7 ± 0.6) × 10(-18) cm(2) molecule(-1) at 352 nm. After scaling the UV spectrum of CH3CHOO to the absolute cross section at 308 nm, the peak UV cross section is (1.27 ± 0.11) × 10(-17) cm(2) molecule(-1) at 328 nm. Compared to the simplest Criegee intermediate CH2OO, the UV absorption band of CH3CHOO is similar in intensity but blue shifted by 14 nm, resulting in a 20% slower photolysis rate estimated for CH3CHOO in the atmosphere.