Transport of polluted boundary layer air from the Po Valley to high-alpine sites

Within the EUROTRAC subproject ALPTRAC the occurrence of reactive trace species at high-alpine sites was investigated. As a part of these studies, the transport of boundary layer air from the Po Valley, which is one potential major source region for air pollution in the Alps, to the high-mountain sites Sonnblick (3106 m) in Austria and Jungfraujoch (3579 m) in Switzerland was studied. A case study based on isentropic trajectories derived from a fine-mesh analysis showed the potential of such transports to cause substantial peaks in the aerosol concentration at Sonnblick. However, on a climatological basis the Po Valley does not seem to cause higher-than-average concentrations of species such as SO2, SO2-4, NH+4 and NO-3. Its contribution was estimated to be about 15% in summer and much less in winter. Indications of orographically induced, subgrid vertical transports were found which are important for the interpretation of data from pollution monitoring programmes at high-alpine sites.