Unaccounted variability in NH₃ agricultural sources detected by IASI contributing to European spring haze episode

Audrey Fortems-Cheiney (1) , Gaëlle Dufour (1) , Lynda Hamaoui-Laguel (2) , Gilles Foret (1) , Guillaume Siour (1) , Martin van Damme (3) , Frédérik Meleux (2) , Pierre-François Coheur (3) , Cathy Clerbaux (3, 4) , Lieven Clarisse (3) , Markus Wallasch (5) , Matthias Beekmann (1)

1 LISA (UMR_7583) - Laboratoire Interuniversitaire des Systèmes Atmosphériques
2 INERIS - Institut National de l'Environnement Industriel et des Risques
3 Spectroscopie de l'atmosphère, Service de Chimie Quantique et Photophysique
4 TROPO - LATMOS
5 Umweltbundesamt

Ammonia (NH₃), whose main source is agriculture, is an important gaseous precursor of atmospheric particulate matter (PM). For the first time, we derived daily ammonia emissions using NH₃ total columns from the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) onboard Metop-A, at a relatively high spatial resolution (grid-cell of 0.5° x 0.5°). During the European spring haze episode of March 2014 8th to 15th, IASI reveals NH₃ total column magnitudes highlighting higher NH₃ emissions over Central Europe (especially over Germany, Czech Republic and eastern France) from the ones provided by the European reference EMEP inventory. These ammonia emissions exhibit in addition a large day-to-day variability, certainly due to spreading practices. The increase of NH₃ emissions in the model, that reaches +300% locally, leads to an increase of both NH₃ and PM10 surface concentrations and allows for a better comparison with independent measurements (in terms of bias, root mean square error and correlation). This preliminary study suggest that there are good promises for better quantifying NH₃ emissions by atmospheric inversions.

Domains: Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics [physics.ao-ph]; Environmental Sciences; Ocean, Atmosphere

Audrey Fortems-Cheiney, Gaëlle Dufour, Lynda Hamaoui-Laguel, Gilles Foret, Guillaume Siour, et al.. Unaccounted variability in NH₃ agricultural sources detected by IASI contributing to European spring haze episode. 4th IASI International Conference, Apr 2016, Antibes Juan-Les-Pins, France. ⟨insu-01305805⟩