Tropospheric cycle of nitrous acid

Abstract

Measurements of the land surface exchange of nitrous acid over grass and sugar beet surfaces reveal both upward and downward fluxes with flux reversal occurring at an ambient concentration of nitrogen dioxide of about 10 ppb. This confirms earlier preliminary findings and strengthens the hypothesis that substantial production of nitrous acid can occur on land surfaces from reaction of nitrogen dioxide and water vapor. Detailed measurements of nitrous acid have been made in central urban, suburban, and rural environments. These measurements, in conjunction with a simple box model, indicate that the atmospheric concentrations of nitrous acid are explicable in terms of a small number of basic processes in which the most important are the surface production of nitrous acid from nitrogen dioxide, atmospheric production from the NO‐OH reaction and loss of nitrous acid by photolysis and dry deposition. In the suburban atmosphere, concentrations of nitrous acid are strongly correlated with nitrogen dioxide. In the rural atmosphere a different behavior is seen, with much higher nitrous acid to nitrogen dioxide ratios occurring in more polluted air with nitrogen dioxide concentrations in excess of 10 ppb. At lower nitrogen dioxide concentrations, net deposition of nitrous acid at the ground leads to very low concentrations in advected air. The model study indicates that during daytime in the suburban atmosphere, production of HONO from the NO‐OH reaction can compete with photolysis giving a HONO concentration of a few tenths of a part per billion. At the highest observed daytime concentrations of HONO, production of OH radical from its photolysis can proceed at a rate more than 10 times faster than from photolysis of ozone.