Abstract
This study presents atmospheric N2O mole fractions measured from discrete air samples from 2001 to 2018 at Mt. Waliguan (WLG) station (36°17′N, 100°54′E, 3816 m asl) in China, which is a global background station of the World Meteorological Organization/Global Atmosphere Watch Programme (WMO/GAW) in central Eurasia. Observed N2O characteristics of annual means, interannual variability, and seasonal cycles were investigated. Our results show that N2O at WLG possess a distinct increasing trend and a statistically significant seasonal cycle, with an average growth rate of 0.9±0.01 ppb yr−1 (1σ)(1ppb=10−9), which is close to the global mean. The detrended seasonal cycle shows a trough of −0.25±0.04 (1σ) ppb in June and a peak of 0.13±0.07 (1σ) ppb in September, with an amplitude of 0.38 ppb. The pattern is due to combined effects of variation in surface sources, vertical convection within the boundary layer and stratosphere to troposphere transportation (STE). The interannual variability in growth rate was partly driven by quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) of tropical zonal wind through stratospheric transport into the troposphere. According to a cluster analysis of back trajectories and the corresponding average N2O load, most air masses cover arid and semi-arid areas in inner Asia with low N2O emissions, indicating that the atmospheric N2O at the WLG represents the background N2O level in central Eurasia.
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Acknowledgements
We thank to the staff at Mt. Waliguan station who have contributed to the system installation and maintenance. We invited them to be the co-authors which they declined. We express our thanks to NOAA GMD CCGG group for their valuable suggestions to our manuscript and their work for conducting the sample analysis and delivery. Thanks also goes to MHD and MLO station for providing the data, to World Data Center for Greenhouse Gases for data management. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41730103 & 41805129).
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Liang, M., Fang, S., Liu, L. et al. Characteristics of atmospheric nitrous oxide observed at Mt. Waliguan GAW global station in the inland Eurasia during eighteen years. Sci. China Earth Sci. 67, 92–104 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-023-1197-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-023-1197-7