Werner, Bodo and Stutz, Jochen and Spolaor, Max and Scalone, Lisa and Raecke, Rasmus and Festa, James and Colosimo, Santo Fedele and Cheung, Ross and Tsai, Catalina and Hossaini, Ryan and Chipperfield, Martyn P. and Taverna, Giorgio S. and Feng, Wuhu and Elkins, JamesW. and Fahey, DavidW. and Gao, Ru-Shan and Hintsa, Erik J. and Thornberry, Troy D. and Moore, Free Lee and Navarro, Maria A. and Atlas, Elliot and Daube, Bruce C. and Pittman, Jasna and Wofsy, Steve and Pfeilsticker, Klaus (2017) Probing the subtropical lowermost stratosphere and the tropical upper troposphere and tropopause layer for inorganic bromine. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 17 (2). pp. 1161-1186. ISSN 1680-7316
Abstract
We report measurements of CH4 (measured in situ by the Harvard University Picarro Cavity Ringdown Spectrometer (HUPCRS) and NOAA Unmanned Aircraft System Chromatograph for Atmospheric Trace Species (UCATS) instruments), O-3 (measured in situ by the NOAA dual-beam ultraviolet (UV) photometer), NO2, BrO (remotely detected by spectroscopic UV-visible (UV-vis) limb observations; see the companion paper of Stutz et al., 2016), and of some key brominated source gases in whole-air samples of the Global Hawk Whole Air Sampler (GWAS) instrument within the subtropical lowermost stratosphere (LS) and the tropical upper troposphere (UT) and tropopause layer (TTL). The measurements were performed within the framework of the NASA-ATTREX (National Aeronautics and Space Administration - Airborne Tropical Tropopause Experiment) project from aboard the Global Hawk (GH) during six deployments over the eastern Pacific in early 2013. These measurements are compared with TOMCAT/SLIMCAT (Toulouse Off-line Model of Chemistry And Transport/Single Layer Isentropic Model of Chemistry And Transport) 3-D model simulations, aiming at improvements of our understanding of the bromine budget and photochemistry in the LS, UT, and TTL. Changes in local O-3 (and NO2 and BrO) due to transport processes are separated from photochemical processes in intercomparisons of measured and modeled CH4 and O-3. After excellent agreement is achieved among measured and simulated CH4 and O-3, measured and modeled [NO2] are found to closely agree with = 1790 ppb), [Br-y(inorg)] is found to increase from a mean of 2.63 +/- 1.04 ppt for potential temperatures (theta) in the range of 350-360K to 5.11 +/- 1.57 ppt for theta = 390 - 400K, whereas in the subtropical LS (i.e., when [CH4]