References

AMT

Atmospheric Measurement Techniques

AMT

Atmos. Meas. Tech.

1867-8548

Copernicus Publications

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/amt-8-987-2015

Measurements of CH3O2NO2 in the upper troposphere

Nault

B. A.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9464-4787

¹ Garland

² Pusede

S. E.

² ⁴ Wooldridge

P. J.

² Ullmann

³ Hall

S. R.

³ Cohen

R. C.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6617-7691

¹ ²

Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

Department of Chemistry, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

Atmospheric Chemistry Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA

now at: NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, USA

27 02 2015

8 2 987 997

2015

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

This article is available from https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/8/987/2015/amt-8-987-2015.html

The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/8/987/2015/amt-8-987-2015.pdf

Methyl peroxy nitrate (CH3O2NO2) is a non-acyl peroxy nitrate that is important for photochemistry at low temperatures characteristic of the upper troposphere. We report the first measurements of CH3O2NO2, which we achieved through a new aircraft inlet configuration, combined with thermal-dissociation laser-induced fluorescence (TD-LIF) detection of NO2, and describe the accuracy, specificity, and interferences to CH3O2NO2 measurements. CH3O2NO2 is predicted to be a ubiquitous interference to upper-tropospheric NO2 measurements. We describe an experimental strategy for obtaining NO2 observations free of the CH3O2NO2 interference. Using these new methods, we made observations during two recent aircraft campaigns: the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry (DC-3) and the Studies of Emissions and Atmospheric Composition, Clouds, and Climate Coupling by Regional Surveys (SEAC4RS) experiments. The CH3O2NO2 measurements we report have a detection limit (S/N = 2) of 15 pptv at 1 min averaging on a background of 200 pptv NO2 and an accuracy of ±40%. Observations are used to constrain the interference of pernitric acid (HO2NO2) to the CH3O2NO2 measurements, as HO2NO2 partially decomposes (~11%) along with CH3O2NO2 in the heated CH3O2NO2 channel used to detect CH3O2NO2.

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