Chemical and biological processes occuring within, above, and below snowpacks influence tropospheric ozone. Measurements available to date and simplified modeling studies indicate that the resulting impact on tropospheric O3 is significant, but available measurements and current modeling capabilities are insufficient for a quantitative estimate of its magnitude. It is of particular importance to improve our understanding of snowpack-atmosphere O3 exchanges because of ongoing and expected future alterations in snow, sea-ice and permafrost extent resulting from climate change, which will alter snowpack O3 impacts in the future. This project provides an integrated approach to address this need, using field measurements to fill key gaps in current knowledge and synthesizing the new and existing data into a chemistry-climate model.
Air-snow exchange fluxes of O3 and NOx (NO+NO2) will be measured at multiple sites with different snow/land types, each for an extended period to capture effects of changing insolation, snowpack properties and (where applicable) soil temperature and soil NOx emissions. Measurements will include O3 and NOx levels and gradients both within and above the snowpack and eddy-correlation O3 fluxes at two heights above the snowpack; ancillary measurements will characterize atmospheric turbulence, actinic flux, micrometeorological parameters and the snowpack's physical and radiative properties. Field locations include Summit, Greenland (representing glacial snowpack), Toolik Lake, Alaska (representing snowpack above permafrost soil and snowpack over frozen lakes) and the Aspen FACE research site operated by Michigan Tech (representing snowpack above biologically active soil). Additional measurements for instrument shakedown at Table Mountain, Colorado, will provide information on intermittent snowpack.
New parameterizations of snowpack processes will be developed and incorporated into single column model (SCM) versions of the global chemistry-climate models ECHAM4 and ECHAM5-MESSy. These parameterizations will be designed to describe the underlying processes and to capture variations among the available and new field measurements, which will be used for model evaluation. The new model system will be used to simulate the impact of air-snow O3 and NOx exchange upon the arctic tropospheric O3 budget.
This work will close existing gaps in understanding of snowpack processes affecting O3, including O3 uptake to snow and the role of biological activity below snowpacks, NOx release from snow, and boundary layer O3 production resulting from snowpack emissions of O3 precursors. It will provide the first measurements of snow-air O3 and NOx fluxes for snow over permafrost and snow over frozen lakes, and the most thorough measurements available for snow over non-permafrost soil. The new snowpack-exchange model will be a very significant advancement over current simulations of snowpack impacts in chemistry-climate models, and will allow such models to better describe the connections between changing Arctic climate and environmental systems. Its use will produce the first assessment of the impact of snowpack photochemical processes upon the arctic and subarctic tropospheric O3 budget, and will provide the basis for assessing the expected impact that climate change will exert upon the tropospheric O3 budget through changing snowcover and permafrost extent.
