William Atkins
Thursday, 12 March 2009 23:39
Science -
Climate
Page 2 of 3
It authors are: J. Mühle, R. F. Weiss, B. R. Miller, P. K. Salameh, C. M. Harth (all from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, U.S.A.); Jens Huang and Ron G. Prinn (Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.); P. J. Fraser (Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Aspendale, Victoria, Australia), L. W. Porter (Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia); and B. R. Greally, S. O'Doherty, and P. G. Simmonds (School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, Bristol, U.K.)
The researchers measured the emissions and lifetime of sulfuryl fluoride in order to determine its potentially harmful effect on our global climate.
The authors state in the abstract to their paper,
“The first calibrated high-frequency, high-precision, in situ atmospheric and archived air measurements of the fumigant sulfuryl fluoride (SO2F2) have been made as part of the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gas Experiment (AGAGE) program.”
AGAGE is a NASA-sponsored global research program. Dr. Prinn, stated,
"In AGAGE, we don't just monitor the big greenhouse gases that everybody's heard of. This program is also designed to sniff out potential greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases before the industry gets very big." [MIT News]
They found that the concentration of sulfuryl fluoride in the troposphere increased by about 5% per year from 1978 to 1999.
They stated in their abstract,
“The global tropospheric background concentration of SO2F2 has increased by 5 ± 1% per year from 0.3 ppt (parts per trillion, dry air mol fraction) in 1978 to 1.35 ppt in May 2007 in the Southern Hemisphere, and from 1.08 ppt in 1999 to 1.53 ppt in May 2007 in the Northern Hemisphere.”
They added,
“The SO2F2 interhemispheric concentration ratio was 1.13 ± 0.02 from 1999 to 2007.”
Dr. Prinn also stated,
“Our analysis has shown that the lifetime is about 36 years, or eight times greater than previously thought, with the ocean being its dominant sink.” [MIT News]
Page three concludes.
