Results from the first national UK inter-laboratory calibration for very short-lived halocarbons

Abstract

Very short-lived halocarbons (VSLH) such as CH₃I, CH₂Br₂ and CHBr₃ provide an important source of reactive halogens to the atmosphere, however high spatial and seasonal variability in their ambient mixing ratios and sea-air fluxes gives rise to considerable uncertainty in global scale emission estimates. One solution to improve global flux estimates is to combine the multitude of individually published datasets to produce a database of collated global halocarbon observations. Some progress towards this has already been achieved through the HalOcAt (Halocarbons in the Ocean and Atmosphere) database initiative, but the absence of a common calibration scale for very short-lived halocarbons makes it difficult to distinguish true environmental variations from artefacts arising from differences between calibration methodologies. As such, the lack of inter-calibrations for both air and seawater measurements of very short-lived halocarbons has been identified as a major limitation to current estimations of the global scale impact of these reactive trace gases. Here we present the key findings from the first national UK inter-laboratory comparison for calibrations of the halocarbons CH₃I, CH₂Br₂ and CHBr₃. The aim of this inter-calibration was to provide transparency between halocarbon calibrations from major UK research institutions, an important step towards enabling all measurements from these institutions to be treated as one coherent integrated dataset for global source term parameterisations.