An airborne perfluorocarbon tracer system and its first application for a Lagrangian experiment

Abstract

Abstract.A perfluorocarbon tracer system (PERTRAS), specifically designed for Lagrangian aircraft experiments, has been developed by the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-und Raumfahrt (German Aerospace Center, DLR). It consists of three main parts: a tracer release unit (RU), an adsorption tube sampler (ATS), and a tracer analytical system. The RU was designed for airborne tracer release experiments; meanwhile, it can be used on various platforms for different experimental purposes (here research vessel). PERTRAS was for the first time applied in the field campaign Stratospheric ozone: Halogen Impacts in a Varying Atmosphere (SHIVA) in November 2011. An amount of 8.8 kg perfluoromethylcyclopentane (PMCP) was released aboard the research vessel Sonne (RV Sonne) near the operational site of this campaign, Miri, Malaysia, on 21 November. The tracer samples collected using the ATS onboard the DLR research aircraft Falcon were analyzed in the laboratory using a thermal desorber-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (TD-GC-MS) system. Guided by forecasts calculated with the Lagrangian model Hybrid Single Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT), 64 tracer samples were collected onboard the Falcon approximately 5 and 25 h after the release, mostly with a time resolution of 1 min. Enhanced PMCP concentrations relative to ambient PMCP background values (mean: 6.62 fmol mol −1 ) were detected during three intersects of the fresh tracer plume (age 5 h), with a maximum value of 301.33 fmol mol −1 . This indicates that the fresh tracer plume was successfully intercepted at the forecast position. During the second flight, 25 h after the release, the center of tracer plume was not detected by the sampling system due to a faster advection of the plume than forecast. The newly developed PERTRAS system has been successfully deployed for the first time. The instrumental setup and comparisons between the measurements and HYSPLIT simulations are presented in this study.

Oxygenated volatile organic carbon in the western Pacific convective center: ocean cycling, air–sea gas exchange and atmospheric transport

“…8) display air mass transport from east to west over the 24 h preceding each measurement. Note that FLEXPART trajectories west of Borneo (south of 4 • N, not shown here) agree well with HYSPLIT trajectories used for an airborne tracer experiment conducted during the SHIVA campaign (Ren et al, 2015). For better visibility, we split the trajectories into five different groups according to slightly different transport patterns.…”

“…FLEXPART calculates transport, dispersion and convection of the air parcels from the horizontal and vertical wind fields, temperature, specific humidity, convective and large-scale precipitation. The chemical decay of the OVOCs was prescribed by their atmospheric lifetime, which was set to 14 h for butanal (Calvert, 2011), 15 h for propanal (Rosado-Reyes and Francisco, 2007), 1 day for acetaldehyde (Millet et al, 2010), 10 days for butanone (Calvert, 2011) and 18 days for acetone (Khan et al, 2015). A second set of simulations was conducted to analyze possible sources of the observed atmospheric mixing ratios.…”

The influence of deep convection on HCHO and H<sub>2</sub>O<sub>2</sub> in the upper troposphere over Europe

“…Establishing a connection between the timing and location of the inflow area and the corresponding outflow of a convective system is the most critical aspect of this type of study, since Lagrangian experiments are practically not possible. One way to establish an unambiguous connection between in-and outflow would be through the use of an artificial tracer released in the inflow area (Ren et al, 2015), ideally from a second airplane. Here we have to rely on sequential measurement, first in the outflow and later in the potential inflow area.…”

Lagrangian matches between observations from aircraft, lidar and radar in a warm conveyor belt crossing orography

“…The approach in our study is, for the first time, to specifically focus on studying the transport along a WCB by the release and re-sampling of a synthetic inert tracer (Ren et al, 2015). For completeness, we briefly note that Lagrangian matches have also been applied in research on stratospheric chemistry, for instance, by Rex et al (1998) to infer ozone loss rates in the Arctic stratosphere from ozonesonde measurements and by Fueglistaler et al (2002) to study the Lagrangian evolution of polar stratospheric clouds from consecutive airborne lidar observations. Since the majority of the WCBs occur over ocean (e.g.…”