Process Analysis of Elevated Concentrations of Organic Acids at Whiteface Mountain, New York

EGUsphere

Christopher Lawrence, Mary Barth, John Orlando, Paul Casson, Richard Brandt, Dan Kelting, Elizabeth Yerger, Sara Lance.

Organic acids represent an important class of compounds in the atmosphere but there are many uncertainties in understanding their formation; in particular, few investigations have been carried out as to their sources in the Northeast U.S. Associated with a heat wave and pollution event on 1-2 July, 2018, unusually high concentrations of formic (HCOOH), acetic (CH3COOH), and oxalic (OxAc) acid in cloud water were measured at the summit of Whiteface Mountain (WFM) in upstate New York. . To investigate the gas phase production of organic acids for this pollution event, this work uses a combination of the regional transport model WRF-Chem which gives information on transport and environmental factors affecting air parcels reaching WFM, the Lagrangian chemical box model BOXMOX, which allows analysis of chemistry with different chemical mechanisms.