NASA GTE TRACE A experiment (September–October 1992): Overview

Abstract

An overview of the Transport and Atmospheric Chemistry near the Equator‐Atlantic (TRACE A) field mission is presented. TRACE A was conducted to provide a comprehensive investigation of the chemical composition, transport, and chemistry of the atmosphere over the tropical South Atlantic Ocean and the adjacent South American and African continents. Measurements for TRACE A consisted of a remote sensing component to derive tropospheric ozone and biomass burning patterns, an airborne atmospheric chemistry component to determine the composition of the air in the most pristine areas of our research domain as well as to characterize the photochemistry and transport of trace gas emissions from both fire and biogenic sources, a series of ozonesonde observations, and an enhanced radiosonde network and airborne meteorological measurements that provided information about the transport of trace gases and the physical processes that were responsible for their observed distributions. The data were interpreted through the use of both photochemical and meteorological numerical models. The picture that emerges from TRACE A is that widespread biomass burning in both South America and southern Africa is the dominant source of the precursor gases necessary for the formation of the huge amounts of ozone over the South Atlantic Ocean. In addition, however, the meteorology in this region of the world is favorable for the accumulation of these pollutants over the tropical Atlantic basin so that photochemical processes produce large quantities of ozone in situ. The generation of ozone occurs over scales of thousands of kilometers and is unusually enhanced in the upper troposphere where relatively high concentrations of nitrogen oxides (NOx) prevail. This latter finding suggests that convective processes (or other lifting mechanisms) may play an important role in the generation of tropospheric ozone or that there may be an additional significant upper tropospheric source of NOx, such as from lightning.