GoAmazon 2014/15. SRI-PTR-ToFMS Field Campaign Report
- Univ. of California, Irvine, CA (United States)
Our science team, including Dr. Alex Guenther (previously at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and now at the University of California, Irvine) Dr. Saewung Kim and Dr. Roger Seco, and Dr. Jim Smith (previously at NCAR and now at UC Irvine), deployed a selected reagent ion – proton transfer reaction – time-of-flight mass spectrometer (SRI-PTR-TOFMS) to the T3 site during the GoAmazon study. One of the major uncertainties in climate model simulations is the effects of aerosols on radiative forcing, and a better understanding of the factors controlling aerosol distributions and life cycle is urgently needed. Aerosols contribute directly to the Earth’s radiation balance by scattering or absorbing light as a function of their physical properties and indirectly through particle-cloud interactions that lead to cloud formation and the modification of cloud properties. On a global scale, the dominant source of organic aerosol is biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOC) emitted from terrestrial ecosystems. These organic aerosols are a major part of the total mass of all airborne particles and are currently not sufficiently represented in climate models. To incorporate quantitatively the effects of BVOCs and their oxidation products on biogenic organic aerosol (BOA) requires parameterization of their production in terrestrial ecosystems and their atmospheric transformations. This project was designed to reduce the gaps in our understanding of how these processes control BVOCs and BOAs, and their impact on climate. This was accomplished by wet and dry season measurements at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility T3 site along with a comprehensive suite of complementary measurements. The specific goals were to 1) measure and mechanistically understand the factors affecting aerosol distributions over a tropical rain forest, especially the effects of anthropogenic pollution as a perturbation to the natural state, and 2) develop and implement an upscaling analysis from this new data set and knowledge of aerosol distributions to prognosticate possible climatic impacts of present-day urban pollution and possibly greater pollution in the future.
- Research Organization:
- DOE ARM Climate Research Facility, Washington, DC (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-7601830
- OSTI ID:
- 1248884
- Report Number(s):
- DOE/SC-ARM-16-004
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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