Journal of Geophysical Research. Atmospheres : JGR

Upward lightning (UL) has become a major threat to the growing number of wind turbines producing renewable electricity. It can be much more destructive than downward lightning due to the large charge transfer involved in the discharge process. Ground-truth lightning current measurements indicate that less than 50% of UL could be detected by lightning location systems (LLS). UL is expected to be the dominant lightning type during the cold season. However, current standards for assessing the risk of lightning at wind turbines mainly consider summer lightning, which is derived from LLS...

Upward lightning is rarer than downward lightning and requires tall (100+ m) structures to initiate. It may be either self-initiated or triggered by other lightning discharges. While conventional lightning location systems (LLSs) detect most of the upward lightning flashes superimposed by pulses or return strokes, they miss a specific flash type that consists only of a continuous current. Globally, only few specially instrumented towers can record this flash type. The proliferation of wind turbines in combination with damages from upward lightning necessitates an improved understanding under which conditions self-initiated upward lightning and the continuous-current-only subtype occur...

With the 2011 promulgation of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the successful negotiation by the United Nations Environment Program of the Minamata Convention, emissions of mercury (Hg) have declined in the United States. While the declines in atmospheric Hg concentrations in North America are encouraging, linking the declines to changing domestic and global source portfolios remains challenging. To address these research gaps, the U.S. Geological Survey initiated the first national-scale effort to establish a baseline of total gaseous mercury stable isotope values at 31 sites distributed across the United States...

Variations in atmosphere total column-mean CO2 (XCO2 ) collected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite can be used to constrain surface carbon fluxes if the influence of atmospheric transport and observation errors on the data is known and accounted for. Due to sparse validation data, the portions of fine-scale variability in XCO2 driven by fluxes, transport, or retrieval errors remain uncertain, particularly over the ocean. To better understand these drivers, we characterize variability in OCO-2 Level 2 version 10 XCO2 from the seasonal scale, synoptic-scale (order of days, thousands of kilometers), and mesoscale (within-day, hundreds of kilometers) for 10 biomes over North America and adjacent ocean basins...

Emissions of methane (CH4 ) in the Permian basin (USA) have been derived for 2019 and 2020 from satellite observations of the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) using the divergence method, in combination with a data driven method to estimate the background column densities. The resulting CH4 emission data, which have been verified using model data with known emissions, have a spatial resolution of approximately 10 km. The CH4 emissions show moderate spatial correlation with the locations of oil and gas production and drilling activities in the Permian basin, as well as with emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx )...

Uncertainties of regional precipitation projections are substantial, and users of such projections face the so-called practitioners dilemma: a plethora of projections with different models from different ensembles of different types and generations are available. But the consistency of these projections has not been systematically assessed, such that no clear guidance about the use of these ensembles exists. Therefore, we systematically compare, separately for each season, projections of mean precipitation and extremes of daily precipitation over Europe across a wide range of climate model ensembles...

Profiles of stratospheric aerosol size distributions have been measured using balloon-borne in situ optical particle counters, from Laramie, Wyoming (41°N) since 1971. In 2019, this measurement record transitioned to the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) in Boulder, Colorado (40°N). The new LASP Optical Particle Counter (LOPC), the fourth generation of instruments used for this record, is smaller and lighter (2 kg) than prior instruments, measures aerosols with diameters ≥0...

Heavy rainfall is a challenge to forecast due to the variety of rainfall intensities and durations across a wide spectrum of high-impact storm types. In this study, we analyze extreme storms in Tropical and Subtropical East Asia, a moisture-rich environment with complex terrain and oceanic regions. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission's Precipitation Radar is utilized to characterize the frequency and rainfall intensity of four extreme storm types. Extreme storms producing heavy precipitation are categorized into four types: deep convective cores (DCCs), deepwide convective cores (DWCCs), wide convective cores (WCCs), and broad stratiforms regions (BSRs)...

We present nighttime worldwide distributions of key features of Blue LUminous Events (BLUEs) detected by the Modular Multispectral Imaging Array of the Atmosphere-Space Interaction Monitor. Around 10% of all detected BLUEs exhibit an impulsive single pulse shape. The rest of BLUEs are unclear (impulsive or not) single, multiple or with ambiguous pulse shapes. BLUEs exhibit two distinct populations with peak power density <25 µWm-2 (common) and ≥25 µWm-2 (rare) with different rise times and durations...

Two persistent and heavy haze episodes during the COVID-19 lockdown (from 20 Jan to 22 Feb 2020) still occur in northern China, when anthropogenic emissions, particularly from transportation sources, are greatly reduced. To investigate the underlying cause, this study comprehensively uses in-situ measurements for ambient surface pollutants, reanalysis meteorological data and the WRF-Chem model to calculate the contribution of NOx emission change and weather-climate change to the "unexpectedly heavy" haze. Results show that a substantial NOx reduction has slightly decreased PM2...

The Brewer-Dobson Circulation (BDC) determines the distribution of long-lived tracers in the stratosphere; therefore, their changes can be used to diagnose changes in the BDC. We evaluate decadal (2005-2018) trends of nitrous oxide (N2 O) in two versions of the Whole Atmosphere Chemistry-Climate Model (WACCM) by comparing them with measurements from four Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) ground-based instruments, the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment Fourier Transform Spectrometer (ACE-FTS), and with a chemistry-transport model (CTM) driven by four different reanalyses...

We investigate and assess how well a global chemical transport model (GEOS-Chem) simulates submicron aerosol mass concentrations in the remote troposphere. The simulated speciated aerosol (organic aerosol (OA), black carbon, sulfate, nitrate, and ammonium) mass concentrations are evaluated against airborne observations made during all four seasons of the NASA Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom) deployments over the remote Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Such measurements over pristine environments offer fresh insights into the spatial (Northern [NH] and Southern Hemispheres [SH], Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans) and temporal (all seasons) variability in aerosol composition and lifetime, away from continental sources...

We examine the thermal structure of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) using observations from 2002 through 2021 from the SABER instrument on the NASA TIMED satellite. These observations show that the MLT has significantly cooled and contracted between the years 2002 and 2019 (the year of the most recent solar minimum) due to a combination of a decline in the intensity of the 11-year solar cycle and increasing carbon dioxide (CO2 .) During this time the thickness of atmosphere between the 1  and 10-4  hPa pressure surfaces (approximately 48 and 105 km) has contracted by 1,333 m, of which 342 m is attributed to increasing CO2 ...

Different functions are used to account for turbulence strength in the atmospheric boundary layer for different stability regimes. These functions are one of the sources for differences among different atmospheric models' predictions and associated biases. Also, turbulence strength is underrepresented in some of the resistance formulations. To address these issues with dry deposition, firstly we take advantage of three-dimensional (3-D) turbulence information in estimating resistances by proposing and validating a 3-D turbulence velocity scale that is relevant for different stability regimes of boundary layer...

Wildfire emissions are a key contributor of carbonaceous aerosols and trace gases to the atmosphere. Induced by buoyant lifting, smoke plumes can be injected into the free troposphere and lower stratosphere, which by consequence significantly affects the magnitude and distance of their influences on air quality and radiation budget. However, the vertical allocation of emissions when smoke escapes the planetary boundary layer (PBL) and the mechanism modulating it remain unclear. We present an inverse modeling framework to estimate the wildfire emissions, with their temporal and vertical evolution being constrained by assimilating aerosol extinction profiles observed from the airborne Differential Absorption Lidar-High Spectral Resolution Lidar during the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality field campaign...

Clouds and blowing snow (BLSN) occur frequently over Antarctica, where it is critical to understand their feedbacks to surface and atmospheric boundary layer processes. Dome C, an elevated East Antarctic station, dominated by lengthy periods of surface longwave (LW) radiative cooling, is selected to reveal cloud and BLSN impacts within a largely stable environment. The sky condition is classified as clear, cloudy, or BLSN, using 3 years of Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations satellite data...

Open questions about the modulation of near-surface trace gas variability by stratosphere-troposphere tracer transport complicate efforts to identify anthropogenic sources of gases such as CFC-11 and N2 O and disentangle them from dynamical influences. In this study, we explore one model's modulation of lower stratospheric tracer advection by the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) of stratospheric equatorial zonal-mean zonal winds at 50 hPa. We assess instances of coherent modulation versus disruption through phase unlocking with the seasonal cycle in the model and in observations...

Ångström exponents ( α ) allow reconstruction of aerosol optical spectra over a broad range of wavelengths from measurements at two or more wavelengths. Hyperspectral measurements of atmospheric aerosols provide opportunities to probe measured spectra for information inaccessible from only a few wavelengths. Four sets of hyperspectral in situ aerosol optical coefficients (aerosol-phase total extinction, σ ext , and absorption, σ abs ; liquid-phase soluble absorption from methanol, σ MeOH-abs , and water, σ DI-abs , extracts) were measured from biomass burning aerosols (BBAs)...

Ocean isotopic evaporation models, such as the Craig-Gordon model, rely on the description of nonequilibrium fractionation factors that are, in general, poorly constrained. To date, only a few gradient-diffusion type measurements have been performed in ocean settings to test the validity of the commonly used parametrization of nonequilibrium isotopic fractionation during ocean evaporation. In this work, we present 6 months of water vapor isotopic observations collected from a meteorological tower located in the northwest Atlantic Ocean (Bermuda) with the objective of estimating nonequilibrium fractionation factors ( k , ‰) for ocean evaporation and their wind speed dependency...

Magnitude of atmospheric turbulence, a key driver of several processes that contribute to aerosol (i.e., particle) deposition, is underrepresented in current models. Various formulations have been developed to model particle dry deposition; all these formulations typically rely on friction velocity and some use additional ad hoc factors to represent enhanced impacts of turbulence. However, none were formally linked with the three-dimensional (3-D) turbulence. Here, we propose a set of 3-D turbulence-dependent resistance formulations for particle dry deposition simulation and intercompare the performance of new resistance formulations with that obtained from using the existing formulations and measured dry deposition velocity...