WINTER: Wintertime Investigation of Transport, Emission, and Reactivity

Summary

WINTER is an atmospheric chemistry campaign that focuses on wintertime emissions and chemical processes in the Northeastern US. The project has three goals:

(1) to characterize the chemical transformations of wintertime emissions with an equal focus on nocturnal and multiphase processes as on photochemistry;

(2) to assess the dominant mechanism of secondary aerosol formation and quantify the geographical distribution of inorganic and organic aerosol types during winter; and

(3) to provide constraints on wintertime emission inventories for urban areas, power plants and agricultural areas, and characterize the export pathways of primary pollutants to the North Atlantic.

WINTER will use the NSF/NCAR C-130 based at NASA Langley in Hampton, VA to address these goals. Operation of the C-130 during winter in the Northeastern U.S. allows comprehensive sampling, in one campaign, of 1) large urban/industrial plumes of nitrogen oxides, VOC, and sulfur from the Northeast corridor as it is advected off the coast, 2) coal-fired power plants throughout the eastern U.S. including the Ohio River Valley and along the East Coast, and 3) distributed emissions from oil and gas extraction, agricultural or biofuel burning, and vegetation in the mid-Atlantic and southeast U.S.