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Title: Reconciling Observed and Predicted Tropical Rainforest OH Concentrations

Journal Article · · Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres
ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [2]; ORCiD logo [3]; ORCiD logo [3];  [4]; ORCiD logo [5]; ORCiD logo [5]; ORCiD logo [6];  [7]; ORCiD logo [8];  [9];  [10];  [11];  [12]; ORCiD logo [12]; ORCiD logo [8]
  1. Univ. of California, Irvine, CA (United States); Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (United States)
  2. Univ. of California, Irvine, CA (United States); Copenhagen Univ. (Denmark)
  3. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, CO (United States)
  4. Peking Univ., Beijing (China); Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA (United States)
  5. Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA (United States)
  6. Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA (United States); Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States)
  7. Univ. of California, Irvine, CA (United States); Hong Kong Univ. (Hong Kong)
  8. Univ. of California, Irvine, CA (United States)
  9. Univ. of Sao Paulo (Brazil)
  10. Universidade Federal do Oeste do Pará, Santarém (Brazil)
  11. Escola Superior de Tecnologia Universidade do Estado do Amazonas, Manaus (Brazil)
  12. Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)

We present OH observations made in Amazonas, Brazil during the Green Ocean Amazon campaign (GoAmazon2014/5) from February to March of 2014. The average diurnal variation of OH peaked with a midday (10:00–15:00) average of 1.0 × 106 (±0.6 × 106) molecules cm-3. This was substantially lower than previously reported in other tropical forest photochemical environments (2–5 × 106 molecules cm-3) while the simulated OH reactivity was lower. The observational data set was used to constrain a box model to examine how well current photochemical reaction mechanisms can simulate observed OH. We used one near-explicit mechanism (MCM v3.3.1) and four condensed mechanisms (i.e., RACM2, MOZART-T1, CB05, CB6r2) to simulate OH. A total of 14 days of analysis shows that all five chemical mechanisms were able to explain the measured OH within instrumental uncertainty of 40% during the campaign in the Amazonian rainforest environment. Future studies are required using more reliable NOx and VOC measurements to further investigate discrepancies in our understanding of the radical chemistry in the tropical rainforest.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Data Center
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
Contributing Organization:
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL); Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL); Argonne National Laboratory (ANL); Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
Grant/Contract Number:
SC0001122
OSTI ID:
1837433
Journal Information:
Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, Journal Name: Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 127; ISSN 2169-897X
Publisher:
American Geophysical UnionCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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