Amelioration of the reactive nitrogen flux calculation by a day/night separation in weekly mean air concentration measurements

The low time resolution of air concentration data of atmospheric deposition in regional monitoring networks makes it difficult to estimate fluxes between the land and the atmosphere. The present study was an evaluation of the effects of day/night separation for a low time resolution of air concentration measurements (i.e., weekly mean) for the estimation of reactive nitrogen fluxes. The target chemical species included reactive nitrogen primarily ammonia (NH3) and nitric acid gas (HNO3) and secondarily nitrous acid gas, particulate ammonium, and particulate nitrate in addition to sulfur dioxide (SO2) as a reference. Monitoring was conducted for one year at a single-crop rice paddy field in central Japan. The study period was divided into the cropping and fallow seasons, which were characterized by rice plants or a drained bare soil surface, respectively. The filter-pack method was applied to measure the weekly mean air concentrations with day/night separation for the target species at two heights (6 and 2 m above the ground surface). Both an inferential and a gradient method were applied to calculate the deposition and exchange fluxes, respectively. The day/night separation in a weekly sampling protocol, on average, reduced the underestimation of HNO3 fluxes for the inferential method by 15.2% ± 6.8% and 8.2% ± 6.1% in the cropping and fallow seasons, respectively, and reduced the overestimation of NH3 fluxes for the gradient method by 121% ± 128% in the cropping season. The fluxes calculated using the inferential method agreed relatively well with those calculated using the gradient method for HNO3 and SO2. The use of single-height measurements for air concentrations with day/night separation and flux calculations using the inferential method are recommended as an appropriate way to enhance the quality in calculated fluxes while simultaneously suppress the increase in labor cost.