National Atmospheric Deposition Programs Atmospheric Mercury Network (AMNet): Dry Deposition of Mercury

Mark Olson1 and David Gay2

The NADP Atmospheric Mercury Network (AMNet) is a collaborative effort involving many federal, state, and tribal agencies, academic researchers, and industry partners across North America and the South Pacific.  AMNet officially began operation in January 2009, and now has over 110 site years of observations for Gaseous Elemental Mercury (GEM), Gaseous Oxidized Mercury (GOM), and Particulate-bound Mercury (PBM2.5). The NADP’s role is to organize individual monitoring groups into a homogeneous monitoring effort, implement consistent standard operating procedures and provide final quality assured data. The end result is a data base of comparable atmospheric mercury speciation measurements coordinated by the AMNet Site Liaison.  The AMNet mercury data provided on the NADP web site is available for use by scientists, modelers, government agencies and educators. In collaboration with Environment Canada, AMNet will estimate short-term rates of dry deposition of the three mercury fractions. This data, in combination with wet deposition rates from associated Mercury Deposition Network (MDN) sites, can be used to approximate “total” mercury deposition (wet plus dry) at individual locations.

 

1NADP Program Office, mlolson@illinois.edu
2NADP Program Office, dgay@illinois.edu