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Formation and Chemical Evolution of Organic Nitrates during Oxidation of Volatile Organic Compounds
QING YE, Abigail Koss, Manjula Canagaratna, Alexander Zaytsev, Jordan Krechmer, Martin Breitenlechner, Kevin Nihill, Christopher Lim, James Rowe, Joseph Roscioli, Frank Keutsch, Jesse Kroll, MIT
Abstract Number: 440
Working Group: Aerosol Chemistry
Abstract
Organic nitrates are understood to comprise a large fraction of total reactive oxidized nitrogen in the atmosphere and are important contributors to aerosol mass. However, our understanding of the chemical fate of organic nitrates during atmospheric processing remains incomplete. In this work, we study the formation and multigenerational aging of organic nitrates from VOC oxidation in chamber experiments. Organic nitrates were formed via oxidizing alpha-pinene and toluene by OH radicals under high NOx condition. A suite of state-of-the-art mass spectrometric instruments, including several chemical ionization mass spectrometers with different ionization schemes and an aerosol mass spectrometer, was deployed to capture a variety of organic nitrate species. Our multi-mass spectrometer technique provides unique insight into the evolution of both individual organic nitrate species and ensemble properties including volatility, carbon number and carbon oxidation state of the chemical system. In addition, we investigated whether aging of organic nitrates will result in renoxification that significantly affects the NOx budget.