Christoph Gerbig

In‐situ observations of mid‐latitude forest fire plumes deep in the stratosphere

We observed a plume of air highly enriched in carbon monoxide and particles in the stratosphere at altitudes up to 15.8 km. It can be unambiguously attributed to North American forest fires. This plume demonstrates an extratropical direct transport path from the planetary boundary layer several kilometers deep into the stratosphere, which is not fully captured by large-scale atmospheric transport models. This process indicates that the stratospheric ozone layer could be sensitive to changes in forest burning associated with climatic warming.

Net fluxes of CO2 in Amazonia derived from aircraft observations

[1] A conceptual framework is developed using atmospheric measurements from aircraft to determine fluxes of CO2 from a continental land area. The concepts are applied to measurements of CO2 ,O 3, and CO concentrations from the Amazon Boundary Layer Experiment (ABLE-2B, April–May 1987) to estimate fluxes of CO2 for central and eastern Amazonia late in the wet season of 1987. We observed that column amounts of CO2 from 0 to 3 km decreased during the day over Amazonia at the average rate of � 6.3 ± 1 mmol m � 2 s � 1 , corresponding to an uptake flux modestly smaller than the daytime uptake (� 10.2 mmol m � 2 s � 1 ) at a flux tower in the study area. The estimated net flux of CO2, integrated over 24 hours, was � 0.03 ± 0.2 mmol m � 2 s � 1 , indicating that the carbon budget of a substantial area of central Amazonia was close to balance in April 1987. We argue that net CO2 fluxes on the continental scale of Amazonia, with its heterogeneous landscape and large areas of inundation, are strongly modified by the influence of seasonal hydrological factors that enhance respiration and decomposition in forests and wetlands, offsetting growth of forest trees in the wet season. INDEX TERMS: 0315 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Biosphere/atmosphere interactions; 0322 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Constituent sources and sinks; 1610 Global Change: Atmosphere (0315, 0325);

Evidence of the effect of summertime midlatitude convection on the subtropical lower stratosphere from CRYSTAL‐FACE tracer measurements

[1] Trace gas and particle measurements taken during the CRYSTAL-FACE mission are used to examine mixing in the summer subtropical lower stratosphere. Vigorous convection in the central and eastern United States injected a significant amount of tropospheric air into the lower stratosphere, which was subsequently advected over the region sampled during the CRYSTAL-FACE mission. Aerosols produced by biomass burning were observed over Florida during a time period with a large number of forest fires in the western United States and eastern Canada, providing evidence of convective injection of tropospheric air into the lower stratosphere. The circumstances of the large-scale flow pattern in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, vigorous summertime convection, abundant forest fires, and the downstream sampling allow a unique view of mixing in the lower stratosphere. We calculate the fractions of midlatitude tropospheric air in the sampled lower stratosphere and mixing rates on the basis of consistency between a number of tracer-tracer correlations. The tropospheric endpoints to the mixing estimates give an indication of midlatitude continental convective input into the lower stratosphere. We also discuss the possible impact of summertime midlatitude convection on the composition of the stratosphere as a whole.