Measurement of tropospheric OH radical concentrations by differential UV laser long path absorption

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Abstract
We describe the UV laser long path absorption technique that was used to measure the concentration of free hydroxyl radicals in the troposphere. The paper discusses the experimental setup and the detection limit that was obtained in field experiments and presents an example of the deconvolution process to evaluate the OH concentration from the spectra. We found that under the conditions of field experiments the observed SNR of the long path air absorption spectra was considerably smaller than values obtained with a short path in the laboratory and predicted from statistical calculations of the detector performance. We attribute this to absorption contributions of yet unknown atmospheric trace species. Present detection limits depend on the absortion path length and range from (0.5-4) x 10 exp 6 OH/cu cm.

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