Outstanding publication award for advancement in atmospheric hydrogen observations
The European Geophysical Union’s (EGU) journal “Atmospheric Measurement Techniques” has granted its annual “Outstanding Publication Award” for a publication on long-term atmospheric observations of molecular hydrogen (H2), co-authored by Armin Jordan from the GasLab at Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (MPI-BGC).
In the context of growing economic interest in hydrogen as a carbon-free energy carrier, the scientific interest has increased to understand the atmospheric H2 budget and the effects of a potentially related rise of its atmospheric abundance. Global and sustained observations of atmospheric hydrogen can provide independent information to document its distribution, to study its sources and sinks and to explore how these may change. To track and study such changes requires high-quality measurements.
The awarded paper describes the challenges and efforts involved in the standardization of hydrogen measurements to meet the required quality. The reference gases used within the largest global observational network operated by the Global Monitoring Laboratory of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are the same that are used for greenhouse gas measurements. Due to chemical processes in the gas containers used, the hydrogen concentration in reference gases often changes over time. They therefore have to be tied to a stable calibration point to keep track of the exact hydrogen concentration. This is provided by the MPI-BGC GasLab that acts as the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Central Calibration Laboratory for molecular hydrogen. In this function the MPI-BGC GasLab serves as global reference for all hydrogen observations performed within the WMO framework. GasLab is also engaged in the global quality control activities to assess the achieved data quality.
The awarded publication highlights a big success in harmonizing the available global atmospheric H2 data from multiple international laboratories.
