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Abstract
Nitric oxide (NO) in the remote marine atmosphere is underestimated by chemistry-climate models. We explore the potential oceanic emissions of NO and its impacts using a global chemistry-climate model with a newly developed oceanic NO emission inventory, considering the abiotic photochemical production of NO in the seawater. The results are evaluated using global observations from the NASA Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom). We propose that the photochemical production of NO from the photolysis of dissolved inorganic nitrite and nitrate in the surface seawater could lead to an oceanic NOx source of ∼3 Tg N per year, which could explain the missing NO in the remote marine boundary layer. This potential oceanic NO source leads to a small but potentially widespread increase in surface ozone and hydroxyl radicals in the remote marine environment, altering our understanding of the role the remote marine atmosphere plays in the global system. Further, the role of the photolysis of nitrate aerosols may be overestimated in recent studies and warrants further investigation.
Department
Earth Systems Research Center
Publication Date
11-11-2025
Journal Title
Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres
Publisher
AGU
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Arkian, F., Thompson, C., Peischl, J., Bourgeois, I., Dibb, J., Jimenez, J. L., et al. (2025). Nitrogen oxides in the remote marine environment: Implications for oceanic emissions and photolysis of particulate nitrate. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 130, e2025JD044077. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JD044077
Rights
© 2025. The Author(s).
Comments
This is an open access article published by AGU in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres in 2025, available online: https://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2025JD044077