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Due to fast industrial growth and a high population density East Asia has become one of the most polluted regions on Earth. In combination with the worlds largest convective system, the Asian summer monsoon (ASM), East Asia now is the most significant source region of pollutants entering the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS). Thus, understanding their transport pathways and the corresponding time scales of their transport and mixing into the UTLS as well as their impact on the UTLSs sensitive chemical composition is of crucial importance for precise climate predictions but is not yet fully achieved. To tackle these questions we use in situ measurements of our multi tracer instrument HAGAR-V (High Altitude Gas Analyzer 5 channel version) during the German research aircraft HALO mission PHILEAS in August/September 2023. Flights from Germany and from Alaska targeted plumes and filaments of ASM air masses in the UTLS above the Mediterranean, the North Pacific, Alaska and Canada. HAGAR-V measured a suite of 30 trace gases including very short-lived NMHCs (e.g. Benzene, C2H2, C4H10), halogenated VOC (e.g. CH2Cl2, CHCl3, C2Cl4, CH2Br2), as well as longer-lived halocarbons (e.g. CH3Cl, CH3Br, CCl4, Halons, HCFCs, and HFCs) every 120 s using in-flight gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. Further long-lived species, including the age-of-air tracer SF6, were measured every 40 s (F12, SF6) and every 80 s (F11, F113, H1211) using electron capture detection. Tracer-tracer relations of species with different source regions and/or atmospheric lifetimes provide insight on sampled air mass origin, mixing, and transport times from the source region to the location of measurement. As shown by Lauther et al. (ACP, 2022) CH2Cl2 is an ideal anthropogenic tracer to identify air masses originating from the ASM region. In the UTLS we find increases of CH2Cl2 by up to 500 % compared to tropospheric background correlating well with other species like SF6, HCFC22, CHCl3, C2Cl4, C2H2, Benzene, and C2H5Cl. The latter three species have tropospheric lifetimes of days to weeks implying that such correlations suggest fast transport from the ASM region to the UTLS. Furthermore, up to 1 ppt enhancement of SF6 in air masses originating from the ASM region suggest a significant ASM-induced negative bias in mean age of air derived from SF6. Tracer-tracer relations of ASM-enhanced short-lived tracers (e.g. CH2Cl2, CHCl3) with long-lived tracers (e.g. F12, N2O) indicate isentropic mixing of polluted air masses into the stratospheric background. In addition, species with more diverse source regions like CH3Br (rural anthropogenic, biomass burning and oceanic), CHCl3 (industrial, soil, and oceanic), CH2Br2 (mainly oceanic), or C2H2 (anthropogenic combustion and biomass burning) yield several different correlation slopes against CH2Cl2. These relations provide an empirical tool that, along with simulated surface origin tracers of the CLaMS (Chemical Lagrangian Model of the Stratosphere) model, further helps to distinguish the origin of the sampled air masses.
Lauther et al. (Mon,) studied this question.