[1] Biomass burning is one of the largest sources of trace gases and aerosols to the atmosphere and has profound influence on tropospheric oxidants and radiative forcing. Using a fully coupled chemistry-climate model (GFDL AM3), we find that co-emission of trace gases and aerosol from present-day biomass burning increases the global tropospheric ozone burden by 5.1% and decreases global mean OH...

The first of the next-generation series of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-R) is scheduled for launch in 2015. The new series of GOES will not have an infrared (IR) sounder dedicated to acquiring high-vertical-resolution atmospheric temperature and humidity profiles. High-spectral-resolution sensors have a much greater vertical-resolving power of temperature, moistur...

BACKGROUND Modern gas analysis techniques permit real time and on-line quantification of multiple volatile trace gases within a single exhalation. However, the influence of various respiratory manoeuvres affecting exhalation flow and the kinetics of metabolite release to the gas-phase remain largely unknown. METHODS We examined variation in the concentrations of selected trace gases over a ra...

In order to elucidate interactions between climate change and biogeochemical processes and to provide a tool for comprehensive analysis of sensitivity, uncertainty, and proposed climate change mitigation policies, we have developed a zonally averaged twodimensional model including coupled biogeochemical nd climate submodels, as a part of an integrated global system nxxlel. When driven with calc...

Selected ion flow tube mass spectrometry, SIFT-MS, has been used to determine the levels of volatile trace gases in the room air of three clinical environments within a busy teaching hospital. The main aims of this study were to establish background levels of trace gases and to compare them to levels typically found within exhaled breath. Over a period of one month, room air samples were collec...

Knowledge about Rayleigh scattering cross sections is relevant to predictions about radiative transfer in the atmosphere, and needed to calibrate the reflectivity of mirrors that are used in high-finesse optical cavities to measure atmospheric trace gases and aerosols. In this work we have measured the absolute Rayleigh scattering cross-section of nitrogen at 405.8 and 532.2 nm using cavity rin...

In order to elucidate interactions between climate change and biogeochemical processes and to provide a tool for comprehensive analysis of sensitivity, uncertainty, and proposed climate change mitigation policies, we have developed a zonally averaged two-dimensional model including coupled biogeochemical and climate sub-models, as a part of an Integrated Global System Model. When driven with ca...

We present a comparison of techniques for estimating atmospheric emissions from fires using Australia's 2009 "Black Saturday" wildfires as a case study. Most of the fires started on Saturday the 7th of February 2009 (a date now known as "Black Saturday") and then spread rapidly, fanned by gale force winds, creating several firestorms and killing 173 people. The fires continued into early March,...

HCHO and CHOCHO are important trace gases in the atmosphere, serving as tracers of VOC oxidations. In the past decade, high concentrations of HCHO and CHOCHO have been observed for the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region in southern China. In this study, we performed box model simulations of HCHO and CHOCHO at a semi-rural site in the PRD, focusing on understanding their sources and sinks and factor...

A new approach to derive tropospheric concentrations of some atmospheric trace gases from ground-based UV/vis measurements is described. The instrument, referred to as the MAX-DOAS, is based on the well-known UV/vis instruments, which use the sunlight scattered in the zenith sky as the light source and the method of Differential 5 Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (DOAS) to derive column amounts ...