Abstract
Located far from anthropogenic emission sources, high-altitude mountain stations are considered to be ideal sites for monitoring climatic and environmentally important baseline changes in free tropospheric trace gases and aerosols. In addition, the observations taken at these stations are often used to study the long-range transport of dust as well as anthropogenic and biomass burning pollutants from source regions and to evaluate the performance of global and regional models. In this paper, we summarize the results from past and ongoing field measurements of atmospheric constituents at high-altitude stations across the globe, with particular emphasis on reactive trace species including tropospheric ozone, along with its precursors such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, total reactive nitrogen, and nonmethane hydrocarbons. Over the past decades, our understanding of the temporal variability and meteorological mechanisms of long-range transport has advanced in tandem with progress in instrumentation and modeling. Finally, the future needs of atmospheric chemistry observations at mountain sites are addressed.
Highlights
Trace gases and aerosols present in the atmosphere are responsible for global changes in the environment and climate of the Earth
We describe past and current atmospheric observations conducted at high-altitude stations on mountains, the data of which are available in public databases or published papers
The origins of air masses associated with high-O3 episodes and the contributions from the stratosphere and the troposphere have previously been discussed in detail, along with the correlations of O3 with water vapor and anthropogenically emitted compounds such as CO, CO2, nonmethane hydrocarbons (NMHCs), and total atmospheric Hg (Ambrose et al 2011; Bonasoni et al 2000b; Cristofanelli et al 2006, 2015; Kajii et al 1998; Tsutsumi et al 1998; Wang et al 2006)
Summary
Atmospheric monitoring programs have been established at a substantial number of mountain stations in order to obtain information on the levels, variability, and trends of trace gases and aerosols in the free troposphere (FT), as well as to assess the influence of anthropogenic and natural emission sources. This station is located in a mountainous area near the coast of the Japan Sea. During fall to spring, westerly winds are dominant (Pochanart et al 1999), and most of the air masses pass over the Asian continent, over Mongolia and northwestern China, driven by the Siberian High (Liu et al 2013).
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