气候变化领域集成服务门户

Ammonia (NH3) contributes to widespread adverse health impacts, affects the climate forcing of ambient aerosols, and is a significant component of reactive nitrogen, deposition of which threatens many sensitive ecosystems. Historically, the scarcity of in situ measurements and the complexity of gas-to-aerosol NH3 partitioning have contributed to large uncertainties in our knowledge of its sources and distributions. However, recent progress in measurements and modeling has afforded new opportunities for improving our understanding of NH3 and the role it plays in these important environmental issues. In the past few years, passive measurements of NH3 have been added to monitoring networks throughout the USA, now in place at more than 60 stations, while mobile measurements aboard aircrafts and vehicles have provide detailed observations during several recent field campaigns. In addition, new remote sensing observations from multiple satellite instruments have begun to provide vast amounts of NH3 observations throughout the globe. These sources of information have collectively driven new air quality modeling capabilities, by revealing deficiencies in current air quality models and spurring development of mechanistic enhancements to models' physical representation of the diurnal variability and bidirectional nature of NH3 fluxes. In turn, these advanced models require further observational constraints, as existing NH3 measurements are still limited in spatiotem-poral coverage. We thus evaluate the potential value of a new geostationary remote sensing instrument (GCIRI) for providing constraints on NH3 fluxes through multiple Observing System Simulation Experiments (OSSEs).