Implications of Arctic Sea Ice Reduction on Tropospheric Bromine, Ozone, and Mercury Chemical Process, Transport, and Distribution

The objective of this project is to investigate impacts of Arctic sea ice reduction on bromine, ozone, and mercury chemical processes, transport, and distribution from sea ice surfaces on the Arctic Ocean, and atmospheric transport of these chemicals to high mountains on land. The project will use data from multiple satellites including MODIS (NASA), AMSR-E (NASA), QuikSCAT (NASA), Envisat ASAR (ESA), GOME-2 (ESA), SCIAMACHY (ESA), RADARSAT SAR (CSA), and also TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X (Kaleschke, Germany) together with past and present measurements from multiple field campaigns such as the IPY Ocean-Atmosphere-Sea Ice-Snowpack Program (OASIS), the Intercontinental Atmospheric Transport of Anthropogenic Pollutants to the Arctic Program (INCATPA), the IPY Circumpolar Flaw Lead System Study (CFL), and the Sea Ice Atmospheric Lagrangian Transport of Salt (SALT) Project and other present and future field experiments, to investigate how changing sea ice conditions can change the rates and nature of chemical processes involving these species. This research will include a new unique field experiment (never done before) to identify the role of different sea ice surface types in the photochemical processes, together with airborne measurements across various Arctic land-seascapes. We will use the Drift-age Model (DM) to characterize sea ice dynamics and distribution. Furthermore, atmospheric dynamics will be included in this research using model analyses such as the National Centers for Environment Prediction and National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR) reanalysis and Rising Air Parcel (RAP) analysis.