Dry Deposition of Ozone over Land: Processes, Measurement, and Modeling.

Dry deposition of ozone is an important sink of ozone in near surface air. When dry deposition occurs through plant stomata, ozone can injure the plant, altering water and carbon cycling and reducing crop yields. Quantifying both stomatal and nonstomatal uptake accurately is relevant for understanding ozone's impact on human health as an air pollutant and on climate as a potent short-lived greenhouse gas and primary control on the removal of several reactive greenhouse gases and air pollutants. Robust ozone dry deposition estimates require knowledge of the relative importance of individual deposition pathways, but spatiotemporal variability in nonstomatal deposition is poorly understood. Here we integrate understanding of ozone deposition processes by synthesizing research from fields such as atmospheric chemistry, ecology, and meteorology. We critically review methods for measurements and modeling, highlighting the empiricism that underpins modeling and thus the interpretation of observations. Our unprecedented synthesis of knowledge on deposition pathways, particularly soil and leaf cuticles, reveals process understanding not yet included in widely-used models. If coordinated with short-term field intensives, laboratory studies, and mechanistic modeling, measurements from a few long-term sites would bridge the molecular to ecosystem scales necessary to establish the relative importance of individual deposition pathways and the extent to which they vary in space and time. Our recommended approaches seek to close knowledge gaps that currently limit quantifying the impact of ozone dry deposition on air quality, ecosystems, and climate.

Gravestone decay and the determination of deciduous bulk canopy resistance to acid deposition.

Gravestone decay and atmospheric concentrations of SO2 are used to determine deposition velocities in two adjacent cemeteries in the Birmingham, UK, Jewellery Quarter. Warstone Lane cemetery is essentially open to the environment with only a limited number of trees. Key Hill Cemetery, located within 100m, has a continuous canopy of 100+ year-old London plane; gravestone decay at Key Hill is 50% less than at Lane for the period after 1960. This difference is used to calculate canopy resistance as a residual term assuming that aerodynamic and quasilaminar resistances are generally similar at both sites. Calculated resistances range from approximately 300 to 900sm-1 and are consistent with estimated and calculated values from a wide variety of studies.

Forest ecosystem respiration estimated from eddy covariance and chamber measurements under high turbulence and substantial tree mortality from bark beetles.

Eddy covariance nighttime fluxes are uncertain due to potential measurement biases. Many studies report eddy covariance nighttime flux lower than flux from extrapolated chamber measurements, despite corrections for low turbulence. We compared eddy covariance and chamber estimates of ecosystem respiration at the GLEES Ameriflux site over seven growing seasons under high turbulence [summer night mean friction velocity (u*) = 0.7 m s(-1)], during which bark beetles killed or infested 85% of the aboveground respiring biomass. Chamber-based estimates of ecosystem respiration during the growth season, developed from foliage, wood, and soil CO2 efflux measurements, declined 35% after 85% of the forest basal area had been killed or impaired by bark beetles (from 7.1 ± 0.22 µmol m(-2) s(-1) in 2005 to 4.6 ± 0.16 µmol m(-2) s(-1) in 2011). Soil efflux remained at ~3.3 µmol m(-2) s(-1) throughout the mortality, while the loss of live wood and foliage and their respiration drove the decline of the chamber estimate. Eddy covariance estimates of fluxes at night remained constant over the same period, ~3.0 µmol m(-2) s(-1) for both 2005 (intact forest) and 2011 (85% basal area killed or impaired). Eddy covariance fluxes were lower than chamber estimates of ecosystem respiration (60% lower in 2005, and 32% in 2011), but the mean night estimates from the two techniques were correlated within a year (r(2) from 0.18 to 0.60). The difference between the two techniques was not the result of inadequate turbulence, because the results were robust to a u* filter of >0.7 m s(-1). The decline in the average seasonal difference between the two techniques was strongly correlated with overstory leaf area (r(2) = 0.92). The discrepancy between methods of respiration estimation should be resolved to have confidence in ecosystem carbon flux estimates.