We describe and show results from a series of field campaigns that used balloonborne instruments launched from India and Saudi Arabia during the summers 2014–17 to study the nature, formation, and impacts of the Asian Tropopause Aerosol Layer (ATAL). The campaign goals were to i) characterize the optical, physical, and chemical properties of the ATAL; ii) assess its impacts on water vapor and ozone; and iii) understand the role of convection in its formation. To address these objectives, we launched 68 balloons from four locations, one in Saudi Arabia and three in India, with payload weights ranging from 1.5 to 50 kg. We measured meteorological parameters; ozone; water vapor; and aerosol backscatter, concentration, volatility, and composition in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS) region. We found peaks in aerosol concentrations of up to 25 cm–3 for radii > 94 nm, associated with a scattering ratio at 940 nm of ∼1.9 near the cold-point tropopause. During medium-duration balloon flights near the tropopause, we collected aerosols and found, after offline ion chromatography analysis, the dominant presence of nitrate ions with a concentration of about 100 ng m–3. Deep convection was found to influence aerosol loadings 1 km above the cold-point tropopause. The Balloon Measurements of the Asian Tropopause Aerosol Layer (BATAL) project will continue for the next 3–4 years, and the results gathered will be used to formulate a future National Aeronautics and Space Administration–Indian Space Research Organisation (NASA–ISRO) airborne campaign with NASA high-altitude aircraft.
Rucio is an open-source software framework that provides scientific collaborations with the functionality to organize, manage, and access their data at scale. The data can be distributed across heterogeneous data centers at widely distributed locations. Rucio was originally developed to meet the requirements of the highenergy physics experiment ATLAS, and now is continuously extended to support the LHC experiments and other diverse scientific communities. In this article, we detail the fundamental concepts of Rucio, describe the architecture along with implementation details, and report operational experience from production usage.
Abstract. Chlorine activation in the Arctic is investigated by examining different parameterizations for uptake coefficients on stratospheric aerosols, high-resolution in-situ measurements and vortex-wide satellite observations. The parameterizations for heterogeneous chemistry on liquid aerosols are most sensitive to temperature with the reaction rates doubling for every 1 K increase in temperature. However, differences between the currently available parameterizations are negligible. For Nitric Acid Trihydrate particles (NAT) the major factors of uncertainty are the number density of nucleated particles and different parameterizations for heterogeneous chemistry. These two factors induce an uncertainty that covers several orders of magnitude on the reaction rate. Nonetheless, since predicted reaction rates on liquid aerosols always exceed those on NAT, the overall uncertainty for chlorine activation is small. In-situ observations of ClO x from Arctic winters in 2005 and 2010 are used to evaluate the heterogeneous chemistry parameterizations. The conditions for these measurements proved to be very different between those two winters with HCl being the limiting reacting partner for the 2005 measurements and ClONO 2 for the 2010 measurements. Modeled levels of chlorine activation are in very good agreement with the in-situ observations and the surface area provided by Polar Stratospheric Clouds (PSCs) has only a limited impact on modeled chlorine activation. This indicates that the parameterizations give a good representation of the processes in the atmosphere. Back-trajectories started on the location of the observations in 2005 indicate temperatures on the threshold for PSC formation, hence the surface area is mainly provided by the background aerosol. Still, the model shows additional chlorine activation during this time-frame, providing cautionary evidence for chlorine activation even in the absence of PSCs. Vortex-averaged satellite observations by the MLS instrument also show no definite connection between chlorine activation and PSC formation. The inter -and intra-annual variability of vortex-average HCl and HNO 3 based on MLS observations is examined for the Arctic winters 2004/2005 to 2010/2011. These observations show that removal of HCl and HNO 3 from the gas-phase are not correlated. HNO 3 loss exhibits great inter-annual variability depending on prevailing temperatures while HCl loss is continuous through December without considerable inter-or intra-annual variability. Only the recovery of HCl in late winter depends on the level of denitrification. Hence, the occurrence of HNO 3 containing PSC particles does not seem to have a significant effect on the speed of initial chlorine activation on a vortex-wide scale.
Stratospheric chemistry and denitrification are simulated for the Arctic winter 2009/2010 with the Lagrangian Chemistry and Transport Model ATLAS. A number of sensitivity runs is used to explore the impact of uncertainties in chlorine activation and denitrification on the model results. In particular, the efficiency of chlorine activation on different types of liquid aerosol versus activation on nitric acid trihydrate clouds is examined. Additionally, the impact of changes in reaction rate coefficients, in the particle number density of polar stratospheric clouds, in supersaturation, temperature or the extent of denitrification is investigated. Results are compared to satellite measurements of MLS and ACE-FTS and to in-situ measurements onboard the Geophysica aircraft during the RECONCILE measurement campaign. It is shown that even large changes in the underlying assumptions have only a small impact on the modelled ozone loss, even though they can cause considerable differences in chemical evolution of other species and in denitrification. Differences in column ozone between the sensitivity runs stay below 10% at the end of the winter. Chlorine activation on liquid aerosols alone is able to explain the observed magnitude and morphology of the mixing ratios of active chlorine, reservoir gases and ozone. This is even true for binary aerosols (no uptake of HNO3 from the gas-phase allowed in the model). Differences in chlorine activation between sensitivity runs are within 30%. Current estimates of nitric acid trihydrate (NAT) number density and supersaturation imply that, at least for this winter, NAT clouds play a relatively small role compared to liquid clouds in chlorine activation. The change between different reaction rate coefficients for liquid or solid clouds has only a minor impact on ozone loss and chlorine activation in our sensitivity runs
Abstract. The international research project RECONCILE has addressed central questions regarding polar ozone depletion, with the objective to quantify some of the most relevant yet still uncertain physical and chemical processes and thereby improve prognostic modelling capabilities to realistically predict the response of the ozone layer to climate change. This overview paper outlines the scope and the general approach of RECONCILE, and it provides a summary of observations and modelling in 2010 and 2011 that have generated an in many respects unprecedented dataset to study processes in the Arctic winter stratosphere. Principally, it summarises important outcomes of RECONCILE including (i) better constraints and enhanced consistency on the set of parameters governing catalytic ozone destruction cycles, (ii) a better understanding of the role of cold binary aerosols in heterogeneous chlorine activation, (iii) an improved scheme of polar stratospheric cloud (PSC) processes that includes heterogeneous nucleation of nitric acid trihydrate (NAT) and ice on non-volatile background aerosol leading to better model parameterisations with respect to denitrification, and (iv) long transient simulations with a chemistry-climate model (CCM) updated based on the results of RECONCILE that better reproduce past ozone trends in Antarctica and are deemed to produce more reliable predictions of future ozone trends. The process studies and the global simulations conducted in RECONCILE show that in the Arctic, ozone depletion uncertainties in the chemical and microphysical processes are now clearly smaller than the sensitivity to dynamic variability.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.