Representing Organic Compound Oxidation in Chemical Mechanisms for Policy-Relevant Air Quality Models under Background Troposphere Conditions

This intercomparison has taken thirteen chemical mechanisms and compared how they treat VOC oxidation and degradation and its relationship to the photochemical formation of ozone and hydroxyl radicals. Here, we have looked in some detail at the incremental responses of hydroxyl radicals to incremental additions of a range of organic compounds under conditions appropriate to the background atmosphere. Most of the time, with most organic compounds and most chemical mechanisms, incremental additions of an organic compound led to depletion of hydroxyl radical concentrations. The chemical mechanisms studied demonstrated increasingly negative incremental hydroxyl radical reactivities with increasing carbon numbers for the alkanes ethane, propane and n-butane. Hydroxyl radical incremental reactivities for the simple alkenes, ethylene and propylene, were reasonably consistent across the chemical mechanisms studied. However, this consistent representation did not extend to trans but-2-ene, where reactivity estimates spanned a range of a factor of five. Incremental reactivities were reasonably well-defined for isoprene which was encouraging in view of its importance to background tropospheric chemistry. The most serious discrepancies emerging from this study were found with the aromatics toluene and o-xylene, and with the Master Chemical Mechanism and these are discussed in some detail.

Modeling and Quantitative Analysis of Tropospheric Impact on Inclined Geosynchronous SAR Imaging

Geosynchronous orbit synthetic aperture radar (GEO SAR) has a long integration time and a large imaging scene. Therefore, various nonideal factors are easily accumulated, introducing phase errors and degrading the imaging quality. Within the long integration time, tropospheric status changes with time and space, which will result in image shifts and defocusing. According to the characteristics of GEO SAR, the modeling, and quantitative analysis of background troposphere and turbulence are conducted. For background troposphere, the accurate GEO SAR signal spectrum, which takes into account the time-varying troposphere, is deduced. The influences of different rates of changing (ROC) of troposphere with time are analyzed. Finally, results are verified using the refractive index profile data from Fengyun (FY) 3C satellite and the tropospheric zenith delays data from international GNSS service (IGS). The time–space changes of troposphere can cause image shifts which only depend on the satellite beam-foot velocity and the linear ROC of troposphere. The image defocusing is related to the wavelength, resolution requirement, and the second and higher orders of ROC. The short-wavelength GEO SAR systems are more susceptible to impacts, while L-band GEO SAR will be affected when the integration time becomes longer. Tropospheric turbulence will cause the amplitude and phase random fluctuations resulting in image defocusing. However, in the natural environment, radio waves are very weakly affected by turbulence, and the medium-inclined GEO SAR of L- to C-band will not be affected, while the X-band will be influenced slightly.

Photochemical oxidation of atmospheric sulphur dioxide

Oxidation of atmospheric sulphur dioxide can occur by homogeneous photochemically initiated gas-phase reactions as well as by heterogeneous reactions in cloud and fog droplets. Gas phase oxidation can result from reactions of excited SO 2 molecules formed by absorption of solar u.v. radiation by ground state SO 2 , from reactions of SO 2 with photochemically generated OH and RO 2 free radicals, and from its reaction with transient species produced in thermal ozone—alkene reactions. Evaluation of the available mechanistic and rate data reveals that, of these three processes, oxidation by free radicals, particularly OH, is likely to be the most important in the atmosphere. Oxidation rates of up to 4 % h -1 are predicted for a hydrocarbon-NO x polluted atmosphere under western European summertime conditions. This can lead to the formation of elevated concentrations of sulphuric acid and sulphate aerosol in polluted air. In the natural background troposphere oxidation rates are much less, ca . 0.3 % h -1 averaged over 24 h, but probably still significant as a source of atmospheric sulphates.