2002 ARCSS All-Hands Workshop

Snow-air transfer: investigating a missing link in a paradigm of atmospheric chemistry

Mary Albert¹, Jack Dibb², Paul Shepson³, Aaron Swanson⁴, Amanda Grannas⁵, Jan Bottenheim^6
1Geophysical Sciences Division, Cold Regions Research & Engineering Lab, 72 Lyme Road, Hanover, NH, 03755, USA, Phone 603-646-4422, Fax 603-646-4278, malbert@crrel.usace.army.mil
²Climate Change Research Group, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, 03824, USA
³Departments of Chemistry and Earth Atmospheric Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA
⁴Department of Chemistry, U.C. Irvine, Irvine, CA, 92967, USA
⁵Departments of Chemistry and Earth Atmospheric Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA
⁶Atmospheric Environmental Sciences, Environment Canada, Downsview, Canada

Understanding the atmosphere-snow-firn-ice-ocean/land system is imperative for predicting the effects of future environmental change on the atmospheric composition of the Earth. Understanding the system is also necessary for interpreting the ice core record; chemical signatures in ice cores are used to infer ancient chemistry of the atmosphere. Recent exciting findings in polar regions indicate that photochemical processes in the snow have a great impact on atmospheric composition; sunlit snow has very recently been shown to be one of the most photochemically and oxidatively active regions of the entire troposphere. This discovery is changing the paradigm in the field of atmospheric chemistry. In this poster we show recent results on air-snow exchange in the Arctic. Measurements of snow properties, inert tracer gas measurements, and interstitial ozone measurements are described along with model results that show the impact of physiochemical processes in snow on air-snow chemical exchange.

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