References

ACP

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

ACP

1680-7324

Copernicus GmbH

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/acp-9-8039-2009

Global distribution of upper tropospheric formic acid from the ACE-FTS

González Abad

¹ Bernath

P. F.

¹ Boone

C. D.

² McLeod

S. D.

² Manney

G. L.

³ ⁴ Toon

G. C.

Department of Chemistry, University of York, York, UK

Department of Chemistry, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA

New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, New Mexico, USA

23 10 2009

9 20 8039 8047

This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/9/8039/2009/acp-9-8039-2009.html

The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/9/8039/2009/acp-9-8039-2009.pdf

We present the first near global upper tropospheric distribution of formic acid (HCOOH) observed from space using solar occultation measurements from the Fourier transform spectrometer (FTS) on board the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment (ACE) satellite. Using a new set of spectroscopic line parameters recently published for formic acid by Vander Auwera et al. (2007) and Perrin and Vander Auwera (2007), we have retrieved the concentrations of HCOOH between 5 km and the tropopause for ACE-FTS observations from February 2004 to September 2007. We observe a significant seasonal dependence for the HCOOH concentrations related to vegetation growth and biomass burning. We estimate an emission ratio of 0.0051±0.0015 for HCOOH relative to CO for tropical South American fires using a selected set of data for September 2004. Results from the balloon-borne MkIV Fourier transform spectrometer are also presented and compared with the ACE measurements.

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