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Published September 28, 2017 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

Lightning NO_x Emissions: Reconciling Measured and Modeled Estimates With Updated NO_x Chemistry

Abstract

Lightning is one of the most important sources of upper tropospheric NO_x; however, there is a large spread in estimates of the global emission rates (2–8 Tg N yr^(−1)). We combine upper tropospheric in situ observations from the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry (DC3) experiment and global satellite-retrieved NO_2 tropospheric column densities to constrain mean lightning NO_x (LNO_x) emissions per flash. Insights from DC3 indicate that the NO_x lifetime is ~3 h in the region of outflow of thunderstorms, mainly due to production of methyl peroxy nitrate and alkyl and multifunctional nitrates. The lifetime then increases farther downwind from the region of outflow. Reinterpreting previous analyses using the 3 h lifetime reduces the spread among various methods that have been used to calculate mean LNO_x emissions per flash and indicates a global LNO_x emission rate of ~9 Tg N yr^(−1), a flux larger than the high end of recent estimates.

Additional Information

© 2017 American Geophysical Union. Received 2 JUN 2017; Accepted 29 AUG 2017; Accepted article online 5 SEP 2017; Published online 18 SEP 2017. Data used are available at https://doi:10.5067/Aircraft/DC3/DC8/Aerosol-TraceGas (DC3), https://mirador.gsfc.nasa.gov/ (NASA SP), http://www.temis.nl/airpollution/no2.html (DOMINO), and https://doi.org/10.6078/D10P4P (GEOS-Chem). Relevant analysis code is hosted at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.801885. B. A. N. was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant DGE 1106400. J. L. L. was supported by the NASA ESS Fellowship NNX14AK89H. B. A. N., P. J. W., and R. C. C. acknowledge funding support from NASA (NNX12AB79G). J. D. C. and P. O. W. acknowledge funding support from NASA (NNX12AC06G and NNX14AP46G). J. D. and E. S. acknowledge funding from NASA (NNX12AB80G). This research used the Savio computational cluster resource provided by the Berkeley Research Computing program at the University of California, Berkeley (supported by the UC Berkeley Chancellor, Vice Chancellor of Research, and Office of the CIO). The authors also want to thank the ground and flight crews of the DC-8 and the DC3 science team.

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Published - Nault_et_al-2017-Geophysical_Research_Letters.pdf

Supplemental Material - grl56410-sup-0001-2017GL074436-SI.pdf

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August 22, 2023
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