Abstract

The ambient concentration of hydrogen sulfide, a species of significance to both gas phase tropospheric chemistry and the interior chemistry of atmospheric aerosols, has been measured over a 13-month period in a location representative of an extreme H2S environment. Peak concentrations exceeding 1 ppm (20-min average) and long-term average values of 24 and 12 ppb (for two different source configurations) were measured at the Artesia Junction, New Mexico, site: such levels exceed nearly all known ambient values by factors of 10–20. The concentration data are found to be represented (in different cases) by either Weibull or gamma distributions or by beta or log normal distributions, this finding thus contradicting previous suggestions of universal log normality in air pollution data and rendering inappropriate the attempts to predict maximum concentrations by the imposition of unverified concentration distributions on limited quantities of data. Nearly all extremely high concentrations occurred between 1800 and 600 hours and were strongly associated with minimums in the local wind turbulence spectrum. The ‘contaminant exposure diagrams’ and the concentration distributions that are presented constitute the first detailed determinations of ambient hydrogen sulfide concentrations.

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