Atmospheric Trace Gas (NO2 and O3) Variability in South Korean Coastal Waters, and Implications for Remote Sensing of Coastal Ocean Color Dynamics
by
Maria Tzortziou 1,2,*, Owen Parker 1, Brian Lamb 1, Jay R. Herman 2,3
, Lok Lamsal 2,4, Ryan Stauffer 2,4 and Nader Abuhassan 2,3
Maria Tzortziou 1,2,*, Owen Parker 1, Brian Lamb 1, Jay R. Herman 2,3, Lok Lamsal 2,4, Ryan Stauffer 2,4 and Nader Abuhassan 2,3
1
Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The City College of New York, City University of New York, New York, NY 10031, USA
2
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
3
Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD 21201, USA
4
Goddard Earth Sciences Technology and Research, Universities Space Research Association, Columbia, MD 21046, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(10), 1587; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10101587
Received: 13 September 2018 / Revised: 29 September 2018 / Accepted: 1 October 2018 / Published: 3 October 2018
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Remote Sensing of Short-Term Coastal Ocean Processes Enabled from Geostationary Vantage Point)
Coastal environments are highly dynamic, and are characterized by short-term, local-scale variability in atmospheric and oceanic processes. Yet, high-frequency measurements of atmospheric composition, and particularly nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ozone (O3) dynamics, are scarce over the ocean, introducing uncertainties in satellite retrievals of coastal ocean biogeochemistry and ecology. Combining measurements from different platforms, the Korea-US Ocean Color and Air Quality field campaign provided a unique opportunity to capture, for the first time, the strong spatial dynamics and diurnal variability in total column (TC) NO2 and O3 over the coastal waters of South Korea. Measurements were conducted using a shipboard Pandora Spectrometer Instrument specifically designed to collect accurate, high-frequency observations from a research vessel, and were combined with ground-based observations at coastal land sites, synoptic satellite imagery, and air-mass trajectory simulations to assess source contributions to atmospheric pollution over the coastal ocean. TCO3 showed only small (<20%) variability that was driven primarily by larger-scale meteorological processes captured successfully in the relatively coarse satellite imagery from Aura-OMI. In contrast, TCNO2 over the ocean varied by more than an order of magnitude (0.07–0.92 DU), mostly affected by urban emissions and highly dynamic air mass transport pathways. Diurnal patterns varied widely across the ocean domain, with TCNO2 in the coastal area of Geoje and offshore Seoul varying by more than 0.6 DU and 0.4 DU, respectively, over a period of less than 3 h. On a polar orbit, Aura-OMI is not capable of detecting these short-term changes in TCNO2. If unaccounted for in atmospheric correction retrievals of ocean color, the observed variability in TCNO2 would be misinterpreted as a change in ocean remote sensing reflectance, Rrs, by more than 80% and 40% at 412 and 443 nm, respectively, introducing a significant false variability in retrievals of coastal ocean ecological processes from space.
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Keywords:
ocean color; satellite; atmospheric variability; nitrogen dioxide; ozone; coastal; ecology; biogeochemistry
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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Tzortziou, M.; Parker, O.; Lamb, B.; Herman, J.R.; Lamsal, L.; Stauffer, R.; Abuhassan, N. Atmospheric Trace Gas (NO2 and O3) Variability in South Korean Coastal Waters, and Implications for Remote Sensing of Coastal Ocean Color Dynamics. Remote Sens. 2018, 10, 1587.
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