First gaseous ion composition measurements in the exhaust plume of a jet aircraft in flight: Implications for gaseous sulfuric acid, aerosols, and chemiions

Abstract

Mass spectrometric composition measurements of gaseous negative ions have been made in the exhaust plume of a commercial jet aircraft (Airbus A310) in flight at altitudes around 10.4 km and at two plume ages around 3.0 and 3.6 s. Negative ions observed inside the exhaust plume are mostly NO3−(HNO3)m and HSO4−(HNO3)m with m ≤2. Outside the plume in the “background” atmosphere the same negative ion species with the same R = (HSO4−(HNO3)m)/(NO3−(HNO3)m) were observed. This indicates that the ions observed in the plume were entrained ambient atmospheric ions. By contrast no indications for negative chemiions (with masses ≤1100 amu) produced by the airbus engines were found in the plume. Furthermore our measurements indicate a modest decrease of the total concentration of entrained negative ions in the plume compared to the ambient atmosphere outside the plume. This decrease may be due to ion‐removal by ion‐attachment to aerosol‐particles and/or ion‐recombination with positive chemiions. We propose that the observed entrained ions can serve as probes for important plume components including gaseous sulfuric acid, aerosol particles and chemiions. Making use of this analytical potential we infer upper limits for the gaseous sulfuric acid concentration, total aerosol surface area density, and positive chemiion concentration. We conclude that initially formed gaseous sulfuric acid must have experienced rapid gas‐to‐particle conversion already in the very early plume at plume ages < 1.6 s.