The enhanced interest in the interactions of the atmospheric trace gases with the surface of ice and snow can be traced back to the discovery of the crucial catalytic role that ice surfaces of polar stratospheric clouds play in the ozone destruction in the Antarctic springtime atmosphere.Since then, studies of gas�ice interactions have been extended to involve not only conditions relevant to the stratosphere and upper troposphere (i.e. polar stratospheric clouds and tropospheric cirrus), but have focused on interactions between atmospheric species and ice phase in general, under a variety of conditions including those at the Earth's surface in polar as well as mid-latitude. Species like nitrate (NO3�) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) are ubiquitous trace compounds innatural snow covers. These and further compounds present in the snow can absorbsolar radiation, which can penetrate into deeper layers of the snow, up to several tens of  centimeters. Reliable information at the molecular level of their adsorption/incorporation properties at the ice surface is still missing. By means of molecular dynamics simulations, we investigate here the adsorptionsites of the nitrate species and its residence times on the ice surface, to which extent these solute penetrates into the QLL or into the ice crystal lattice, whether it preferentially segregates to the liquid/vapor or liquid/ice interface, what is its mobility and the mechanism of diffusion in the QLL and in ice, etc. Potential model issues will be also discussed.

Molecular simulation studies of the adsorption of nitrate on the surface of ice

242nd National Meeting (2011)

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