Observations of atmospheric chemical deposition to high Arctic snow

Abstract

Rapidly rising temperatures and loss of snow and ice cover have demonstrated the unique vulnerability of the high Arctic to climate change. There are major uncertainties in modelling the chemical depositional and scavenging processes of Arctic snow. To that end, fresh snow samples collected on average every 4 days at Alert, Nunavut, from September 2014 to June 2015 were analyzed for black carbon, major ions, and metals, and their concentrations and fluxes were reported. Comparison with simultaneous measurements of atmospheric aerosol mass loadings yields effective deposition velocities that encompass all processes by which the atmospheric species are transferred to the snow. It is inferred from these values that dry deposition is the dominant removal mechanism for several compounds over the winter while wet deposition increased in importance in the fall and spring, possibly due to enhanced scavenging by mixed-phase clouds. Black carbon aerosol was the least effi- ciently deposited species to the snow. ; Funding of this study was provided as part of the Network on Climate and Aerosols Research (NETCARE), Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the government of Ontario through the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS), and Environment and Climate Change Canada. This project would not have been possible without the collaboration of many skilled individuals: Richard Leaitch at Environment Canada and Catherine Philips-Smith and Cheol-Heon Jeong at the University of Toronto.