Abundances, emissions, and loss processes of the long-lived and potent greenhouse gas octafluorooxolane (octafluorotetrahydrofuran, c-C4F8O) in the atmosphere

Vollmer, Martin K.; Bernard, François; Mitrevski, Blagoj; Steele, L. Paul; Trudinger, Cathy M.; Reimann, Stefan; Langenfelds, Ray L.; Krummel, Paul B.; Fraser, Paul J.; Etheridge, David M.; Curran, Mark A. J.; Burkholder, James B.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-3481-2019

Articles | Volume 19, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-3481-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-3481-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 6

Research article

|

20 Mar 2019

Research article |

| 20 Mar 2019

Abundances, emissions, and loss processes of the long-lived and potent greenhouse gas octafluorooxolane (octafluorotetrahydrofuran, c-C₄F₈O) in the atmosphere

Martin K. Vollmer, François Bernard, Blagoj Mitrevski, L. Paul Steele, Cathy M. Trudinger, Stefan Reimann, Ray L. Langenfelds, Paul B. Krummel, Paul J. Fraser, David M. Etheridge, Mark A. J. Curran, and James B. Burkholder

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Final revised paper (published on 20 Mar 2019)
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Preprint (discussion started on 25 Sep 2018)
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Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 16 Oct 2018
- AC1: 'Reply to Reviewer 1', Martin Vollmer, 10 Jan 2019
RC2: 'Review of article acp-2018-852', Anonymous Referee #2, 25 Oct 2018
- AC2: 'Reply to Reviewer 2', Martin Vollmer, 10 Jan 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Martin Vollmer on behalf of the Authors (01 Feb 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (11 Feb 2019) by Andreas Engel

AR by Martin Vollmer on behalf of the Authors (19 Feb 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (21 Feb 2019) by Andreas Engel

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Short summary

We have discovered a new compound in the atmosphere, octafluorooxolane (c-C₄F₈O), from measurements in archived air samples. From our laboratory studies, we find that c-C₄F₈O is a very powerful greenhouse gas thereby contributing to global warming, and that it has a very long atmospheric lifetime of more than 3500 years. Based on our measurements we could reconstruct its atmospheric evolution over more than 4 decades. Based on this, we could estimate the global emissions of c-C₄F₈O.