Inter-comparison of measurements of inorganic chemical components in precipitation from NADP and CAPMoN at collocated sites in the USA and Canada during 1986–2019

Abstract Wet deposition monitoring is a critical part of the long-term monitoring of acid deposition, which aims to assess the ecological impact of anthropogenic emissions of SO2 and NOx. In North America, long-term wet deposition has been monitored through two national networks: the Canadian Air and Precipitation Monitoring Network (CAPMoN) and the US National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP), for Canada and the USA, respectively. In order to assess the comparability of measurements from the two networks, collocated measurements have been made at two sites, one in each country, since 1986 (Sirois et al., in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 62, 273–303, 2000; Wetherbee et al., in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 1995–2004, 2010). In this study, we compared the measurements from NADP and CAPMoN instrumentation at the collocated sites at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), USA, from 1989 to 2016, and Frelighsburg, Quebec, Canada, from 2002 to 2019. We also included in the study the collocated daily-vs-weekly measurements by the CAPMoN network during 1999–2001 and 2016–2017 in order to evaluate the differences in wet concentration of ions due to sampling frequency alone. The study serves as an extension to two previous CAPMoN-NADP inter-comparisons by Sirois et al. (Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 62, 273–303, 2000) and Wetherbee et al., in (Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 1995–2004, 2010). At the Penn State University site, for 1986–2019, CAPMoN was higher than NADP for all ions, in terms of weekly concentration, precipitation-weighted annual mean concentration, and annual wet deposition. The precipitation-weighted annual mean concentrations were higher for SO42− (2%), NO3− (12%), NH4+ (16%), H+ (6%), and base cations and Cl− (11–15%). For annual wet deposition, CAPMoN was higher for SO4−2, NO3−, NH4+ and H+ (5–17%), and base cations and Cl− (12–17%) during 1986–2019. At the Frelighsburg site, NADP changed the sample collector in October 2011. For 2002–2011, the relative differences at the Frelighsburg site were positive and similar in magnitude to those at the Penn State site. For 2012–2019, the precipitation-weighted annual mean concentrations were 5–27% lower than NADP, except for H+, which was 23% higher. The change in sample collector by NADP had the largest effect on between-network biases. The comparisons of daily-vs-weekly measurements conducted by the CAPMoN network during 1999–2001 and 2016–2017 show that the weekly measurements were higher than the daily measurements by 1–3% for SO42−, NO3−, and NH4+; 3–9% for Ca2+, Mg2+, Na+, and Cl−; 10–24% for K+; and lower for H+ by 8–30% in terms of precipitation-weighted mean concentration. Thus, differences in sampling frequencies did not contribute to the systematically higher CAPMoN measurements. Understanding the biases in the data for these networks is important for interpretation of continental scale deposition models and transboundary comparison of wet deposition trends.

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