Pollutant transport over complex terrain: Flux and budget calculations for the pollumet field campaign

Abstract

Especially over complex terrain, transport processes dominate the local pollutant concentrations observed. The data gathered during the POLLUMET measuring campaign in 1993 allow a quantitative analysis of the pollutant fluxes and the pollutant budgets. The data include airborne measurements by NCAR's King Air, radio soundings, radar wind profiles, and data from meteorological ground stations. The regions of interest were the rather densely populated Swiss Plateau, which is embedded between the Alps and the Jura Mountains, and a box south of the Alps covering the south Ticino region and parts of northern Italy. An interpolation scheme was developed to reconstruct the wind field from all available measurements. From the wind field and the reconstruction of the concentration field the fluxes into and out of a box with fixed boundaries are calculated. The pollutant budgets are obtained from the sum of the fluxes and considering a mean vertical velocity. To assess the uncertainties introduced through the interpolation of the measurements, an extensive sensitivity analysis is included. The Swiss Plateau exports ozone and nitrogen oxides. The export rates can be interpreted as an ozone accumulation or fraction of ‘homemade pollution’ between 3 and 10% and require a net production rate of 1–2 ppb h −1. Accumulation of nitrogen oxides amounts to 20–60%. The box south of the Alps imports polluted air from northern Italy. Thus, oxidized nitrogen is not exported but a net production of ozone still occurs at a rate of 1–2 ppb h −1. The interpolated flow and concentration fields are decomposed into the mean over a box-boundary and the deviation from that mean. This allows isolation of the contribution of local circulations and large-scale turbulence to the total flux. It is shown how the local thermotopographic circulations increasingly dominate the transport as typical Alpine topography is approached. Even over the Swiss Plateau, approximately 20 km away from Alpine topography, coherent structures with a scale of 2–20 km contribute to the transport, which occurs mainly with the mean wind, however.