Deriving an atmospheric budget of total organic bromine using airborne in situ measurements from the western Pacific area during SHIVA

Abstract. During the recent SHIVA (Stratospheric Ozone: Halogen Impacts in a Varying Atmosphere) project an extensive data set of all halogen species relevant for the atmospheric budget of total organic bromine was collected in the western Pacific region using the Falcon aircraft operated by the German Aerospace agency DLR (Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt) covering a vertical range from the planetary boundary layer up to the ceiling altitude of the aircraft of 13 km. In total, more than 700 measurements were performed with the newly developed fully automated in situ instrument GHOST-MS ( G as c h romatograph for the O b s ervation of T racers – coupled with a M ass S pectrometer) by the Goethe University of Frankfurt (GUF) and with the onboard whole-air sampler WASP with subsequent ground-based state-of-the-art GC / MS analysis by the University of East Anglia (UEA). Both instruments yield good agreement for all major (CHBr 3 and CH 2 Br 2 ) and minor (CH 2 BrCl, CHBrCl 2 and CHBr 2 Cl) VSLS (very short-lived substances), at least at the level of their 2σ measurement uncertainties. In contrast to the suggestion that the western Pacific could be a region of strongly increased atmospheric VSLS abundance (Pyle et al., 2011), we found only in the upper troposphere a slightly enhanced amount of total organic bromine from VSLS relative to the levels reported in Montzka and Reimann et al. (2011) for other tropical regions. From the SHIVA observations in the upper troposphere, a budget for total organic bromine, including four halons (H-1301, H-1211, H-1202, H-2402), CH 3 Br and the VSLS, is derived for the level of zero radiative heating (LZRH), the input region for the tropical tropopause layer (TTL) and thus also for the stratosphere. With the exception of the two minor VSLS CHBrCl 2 and CHBr 2 Cl, excellent agreement with the values reported in Montzka and Reimann et al. (2011) is found, while being slightly higher than previous studies from our group based on balloon-borne measurements.