Heterogeneity and chemical reactivity of the remote troposphere defined by aircraft measurements – corrected

In this paper we present and analyze a data set of 10 s (2 km) merged and gap-filled observations of the key reactive species driving the chemical budgets of O-3 and CH4 (O-3, CH4, CO, H2O, HCHO, H2O2, CH3OOH, C2H6, higher alkanes, alkenes, aromatics, NOx, HNO3, HNO4, peroxyacetyl nitrate, and other organic nitrates), consisting of 146 494 distinct air parcels from ATom deployments 1 through 4.

Six models calculated the O-3 and CH4 photochemical tendencies from this modeling data stream for ATom 1. We find that 80 %-90 % of the total reactivity lies in the top 50 % of the parcels and 25 %-35 % in the top 10 %, supporting previous model-only studies that tropospheric chemistry is driven by a fraction of all the air. Surprisingly, the probability densities of species and reactivities averaged on a model scale (100 km) differ only slightly from the 2 km ATom 10 s data, indicating that much of the heterogeneity in tropospheric chemistry can be captured with current global chemistry models.