FATE OF MERCURY IN THE ARCTIC Michael Evan ... - COGCI

Fate of Mercury in the Arctic 74
from the coast, as opposed from the town of Barrow, and is 45 0 to 135 0 . The system was oriented to
360 0 . The way the data was reported by the system was not sufficient for in depth analysis, but
sufficient enough for the pilot measurements.
In the new REA system, there are graphs correlating temperature, wind speed and direction
with the turbulence. This is an important improvement since little can be done with average data for
a run, since gusts for example, may carry much of the RGM mass from the coastline, while the
prevailing winds are coming from another location. This will not be seen when simply taking
averages into consideration. Due to the nature of micrometeorological measurements, the REA
system works best at wind speeds near 5 m s -1 since there needs to be good turbulence to sample.
Wind speeds less than 2 m s -1 are nominal. During the campaign, on average, the wind is coming
outside of the CMDL defined clean air sector. This means that during the measurements, the wind
was uncharacteristically coming from the town of Barrow. There are no known sources of RGM or
elemental mercury in the town, so this should not have affected the measurements. The standard
deviation in the vertical wind component is actually much higher than expected. It was expected
that we would find 0.18, with little variability, given the stable terrain, and weather conditions, and
instead found a campaign average value of 0.29 with a standard deviation of 0.11. The
proportionality constant was also higher than the 0.3 expected, though lower than 0.6, as it should
be, for a dynamic deadband. The campaign average was 0.41 with a standard deviation of 0.01.
Indicating no significant variation in the heat flux. The machine reported all numbers to four
decimals; results have been rounded to two.