Florida thunderstorms: A faucet of reactive nitrogen to the upper troposphere

Abstract

[1] During the July 2002 Cirrus Regional Study of Tropical Anvils and Cirrus LayersFlorida Area Cirrus Experiment (CRYSTAL-FACE), flights of a WB-57F aircraft revealed mixing ratios of nitric oxide 10-50 times background over distances of 25-175 km in the anvils of thunderstorms and in clear air downwind of storm systems due to lightning activity and possible transport from the boundary layer. Estimates of the total mass of NO x injected into the middle and upper troposphere differed considerably for a moderately versus highly electrically active storm system as expected. However, assuming that the total mass is dominated by lightning production, rough estimates of the production per average lightning flash for a moderately and a highly active storm also yielded quite different ranges of (0.33-0.66) Â 10 26 and (1.7-2.3) Â 10 26 molecules NO/flash, respectively. If the common assumption is made that intracloud flashes have 1/10th the NO production efficiency of cloud-to-ground (CG) flashes, the ranges of production for the moderately and highly active storms were (0.88-1.8) Â 10 26 and (4.5-6.1) Â 10 26 molecules NO/CG flash, respectively. The observed CG flash accumulations and NO x mass production estimate for the month of July 2002 over the Florida area are compared with results from the MOZART-2 global chemistry-transport model that uses a common lightning flash parameterization. Reasonable agreement was found after a correction to the lightning parameterization was made. Finally, broad-scale median mixing ratios of NO within anvils over Florida were significantly larger than found in storms previously investigated over Colorado and New Mexico.

Evaluation of OMI operational standard NO<sub>2</sub> column retrievals using in situ and surface-based NO<sub>2</sub> observations

“…The P-3B aircraft housed two well-characterized in situ NO 2 measuring instruments: The University of California, Berkeley thermal dissociation laser induced fluorescence (TD-LIF, (Thornton et al, 2000;Wagner et al, 2011) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) 4-channel chemiluminescence instrument (P-CL). The P-CL measures NO 2 by photolysis of NO 2 and chemiluminescence detection of the product NO (Ridley and Grahek, 1990;Ridley et al, 2004). The TD-LIF instrument had a low NO 2 sampling frequency due to an alternating measurement cycle for other species such as peroxynitrates, alkylnitrates, and nitric acid, so we use measurements from the NCAR P-CL.…”

Emissions from biomass burning in the Yucatan

“…Sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ) was measured by the NOAA UV pulsed fluorescence instrument (Thermo Electron model 43C-TL modified for aircraft use). O 3 , NO, NO 2 , and NO y (the sum of all N-containing species minus HCN, NH 3 , and N 2 ) were measured by the NCAR chemiluminescence instrument (Ridley et al, 2004). Formaldehyde was measured by the NCAR difference frequency generation (DFG) airborne spectrometer (Weibring et al, 2007).…”

Sources and characteristics of summertime organic aerosol in the Colorado Front Range: perspective from measurements and WRF-Chem modeling

“…The auxiliary gas-phase data used in this analysis are carbon monoxide (CO) by vacuum UV resonance fluorescence (Gerbig et al, 1999); nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) by chemiluminescence (Ridley et al, 2004); ethane (C 2 H 6 ) by infrared spectrometry (Richter et al, 2015); aromatic and biogenic species by online proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometry (Lindinger et al, 1998;de Gouw and Warneke, 2007); hydrogen cyanide (HCN); i-pentane and npentane by online cryogenic gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) (Apel et al, 2015); methylcyclohexane and n-octane by offline analysis of whole air canister samples (WAS) by GC-MS (Colman et al, 2001); nitric acid (HNO 3 ) by chemical ionization mass spectrometry (CIMS) using SF − 6 as the reagent ion (Huey et al, 1998); peroxyacyl nitrates (PAN and PPN) by I − CIMS (Zheng et al, 2011); alkyl nitrates by thermal dissociation laser-induced fluorescence (Day et al, 2002); and hydroxyl (OH), hydroperoxy (HO 2 ), and alkyl peroxy (RO 2 ) radicals by CIMS (Mauldin et al, 1998;Hornbrook et al, 2011;Ren et al, 2012). NO y was calculated by summing up the individually measured nitrogen oxide species, namely NO, NO 2 , HNO 3 , particulate nitrate, PAN, PPN, and alkyl nitrates.…”