Is the ocean surface a source of nitrous acid (HONO) in the marine boundary layer?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Nitrous acid, HONO, is a key net photolytic precursor to OH radicals in the atmospheric boundary later. As OH is the dominant atmospheric oxidant, driving the removal of many primary pollutants and the formation of secondary species, a quantitative understanding of HONO sources is important to predict atmospheric oxidising capacity. While a number of HONO formation mechanisms have been identified, recent work has ascribed significant importance to the dark, ocean-surface mediated conversion of NO2 to HONO in the coastal marine boundary layer. In order to evaluate the role of this mechanism, here we analyse measurements of HONO and related species obtained at two contrasting coastal locations – Cape Verde (Atlantic Ocean), representative of the clean remote tropical marine boundary layer, and Weybourne (United Kingdom), representative of semi-polluted Northern European coastal waters. As expected, higher average concentrations of HONO (70 ppt) were observed in marine air for the more anthropogenically influenced Weybourne location compared to Cape Verde (HONO < 5 ppt). At both sites, the approximately constant HONO/NO2 ratio at night pointed to a low importance for the dark ocean-surface mediated conversion of NO2 into HONO, whereas the midday maximum in the HONO/NO2 ratios indicated significant contributions from photo-enhanced HONO formation mechanisms (or other sources). We obtained an upper limit to the rate coefficient of dark ocean-surface HONO-to-NO2 conversion of CHONO = 0.0011 ppb hr−1 from the Cape Verde observations; this is a factor of 5 lower than the slowest rate reported previously. These results point to significant geographical variation in the predominant HONO formation mechanisms in marine environments and indicate that caution is required when extrapolating the importance of such mechanisms from individual study locations to assess regional and/or global impacts on oxidising capacity. As a significant fraction of atmospheric processing occurs in the marine boundary layer, particularly in the tropics, better constraint of the possible ocean surface source of HONO is important for a quantitative understanding of chemical processing of primary trace gases in the global atmospheric boundary layer and associated impacts upon air pollution and climate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".