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GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS,
VOL. 37,
L05804,
4 PP., 2010
doi:10.1029/2009GL041726
Long tails in deep columns of natural and anthropogenic tropospheric tracers
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA
Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA
Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA
Department of Environmental Sciences, Rutgers- State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA
Frontier Research Center for Global Change, Yokohama, Japan
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA
Department of Mathematics, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA
Simple prototypes for forced advection-diffusion problems are known to produce passive tracer distributions that exhibit approximately exponential or stretched exponential tails. Having previously found an approximately exponential tail for the column integrated water vapor (CWV) distribution under high precipitation conditions, we conjectured that if such prototypes are relevant to more complex tropospheric tracer problems, we should find such tails for a wide set of tracers. Here it is shown that such tails are indeed ubiquitous in observed, model, and reanalysis data sets for a variety of tracers, either column integrated or averaged through a deep layer, including CO and CO2. The long tails in CWV are associated with vertical transport and can occur independent of a local precipitation sink. These non-Gaussian distributions can have consequences for source attribution studies of anthropogenic tracers, and for mechanisms of precipitation extremes; the properties of the tails may help constrain model tracer simulations.
Received 16 November 2009; accepted 27 January 2010; published 4 March 2010.
Citation: (2010), Long tails in deep columns of natural and anthropogenic tropospheric tracers, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L05804, doi:10.1029/2009GL041726.
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