Atmospheric composition in the European Arctic and 30 years of the Zeppelin Observatory, Ny-Ålesund
Stephen M. Platt, Øystein Hov, Torunn Berg, Knut Breivik, Sabine Eckhardt, Konstantinos Eleftheriadis, Nikolaos Evangeliou, Markus Fiebig, Rebecca Fisher, Georg Hansen, Hans‐Christen Hansson, Jost Heintzenberg, Ove Hermansen, Dominic Heslin‐Rees, Kim Holmén, Stephen R. Hudson, Roland Kallenborn, Radovan Krejčí, Terje Krognes, Steinar Larssen, David Lowry, Cathrine Lund Myhre, Chris Lunder, Euan G. Nisbet, Pernilla Bohlin‐Nizzetto, Ki‐Tae Park, Christina A. Pedersen, Katrine Aspmo Pfaffhuber, Thomas Röckmann, Norbert Schmidbauer, Sverre Solberg, A. Stohl, J. Ström, Tove Svendby, Peter Tunved, Kjersti Karlsen Tørnkvist, Carina van der Veen, Stergios Vratolis, Young Jun Yoon, Karl Espen Yttri, Paul Zieger, Wenche Aas, Kjetil Tørseth
Abstract
Abstract. The Zeppelin Observatory (78.90∘ N, 11.88∘ E) is located on Zeppelin Mountain at 472 m a.s.l. on Spitsbergen, the largest island of the Svalbard archipelago. Established in 1989, the observatory is part of Ny-Ålesund Research Station and an important atmospheric measurement site, one of only a few in the high Arctic, and a part of several European and global monitoring programmes and research infrastructures, notably the European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (EMEP); the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP); the Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW); the Aerosol, Clouds and Trace Gases Research Infrastructure (ACTRIS); the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) network; and the Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS). The observatory is jointly operated by the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI), Stockholm University, and the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU). Here we detail the establishment of the Zeppelin Observatory including historical measurements of atmospheric composition in the European Arctic leading to its construction. We present a history of the measurements at the observatory and review the current state of the European Arctic atmosphere, including results from trends in greenhouse gases, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), other traces gases, persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and heavy metals, aerosols and Arctic haze, and atmospheric transport phenomena, and provide an outline of future research directions.