Reconciling Observed and Predicted Tropical Rainforest OH Concentrations

We present OH observations made in Amazonas, Brazil during the Green Ocean Amazon campaign (GoAmazon2014/5) from February to March of 2014. The average diurnal variation of OH peaked with a midday (10:00–15:00) average of 1.0 × 106 (±0.6 × 106) molecules cm−3. This was substantially lower than previously reported in other tropical forest photochemical environments (2–5 × 106 molecules cm−3) while the simulated OH reactivity was lower. The observational data set was used to constrain a box model to examine how well current photochemical reaction mechanisms can simulate observed OH. We used one near‐explicit mechanism (MCM v3.3.1) and four condensed mechanisms (i.e., RACM2, MOZART‐T1, CB05, CB6r2) to simulate OH. A total of 14 days of analysis shows that all five chemical mechanisms were able to explain the measured OH within instrumental uncertainty of 40% during the campaign in the Amazonian rainforest environment. Future studies are required using more reliable NOx and VOC measurements to further investigate discrepancies in our understanding of the radical chemistry in the tropical rainforest.Key PointsOH observations with a chemical ionization mass spectrometer during the GoAmazon2014/5 study were lower than some previous studiesBox model simulations of OH were carried out with five different chemical mechanismsObserved and model‐predicted OH concentrations agree to within measurement uncertainty of 40%Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/171256/1/jgrd57519_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/171256/2/2020JD032901-sup-0001-Supporting_Information_SI-S01.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/171256/3/jgrd57519.pd