An Empirical Model for Dinitrogen Gas Emission from Inland Waters

Abstract

The motivation to calculate this empirical model resulted from often observing-at the time disconcerting-excess dinitrogen gas (N 2 concentration > background concentration) in bubble-gas emission samples, collected primarily for the purpose of carbon budget research, from Brazilian rivers and reservoirs sampled during roughly 100 field surveys lasting 4 days each on average and executed between years 2000 and 2012. We model the (serendipitously) measured dinitrogen gas above environmental concentration (N 2 aec) escaping in bubbles from Brazilian rivers as a function of dissolved nitrogen (N) in water. To this model, we mathematically add a pre-existing model of diffusively emitted denitrified dinitrogen (also as a function of dissolved N) from streams in the United States of America (USA). The resulting model predicts denitrified dinitrogen water-air emission from inland waters in the USA, China and Germany.