Author(s)

Elizabeth Sikar^1*, Marco Aurelio dos Santos², Ednaldo Oliveira dos Santos³

¹Rua Sebastião de Moraes, São Carlos, Brazil.
²Energy Planning Program/COPPE/UFRJ, Centro de Tecnologia, Bloco C, Sala 211, Cidade Universitária, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
³Department of Environmental Sciences, Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, Seropédica, Brazil.

The motivation to calculate this empirical model resulted from often observing—at the time disconcerting—excess dinitrogen gas (N₂ concentration > background concentration) in bubble-gas emission samples, collected primarily for the purpose of carbon budget research, from Brazilian rivers and reservoirs sampled during roughly 100 field surveys lasting 4 days each on average and executed between years 2000 and 2012. We model the (serendipitously) measured dinitrogen gas above environmental concentration (N₂aec) escaping in bubbles from Brazilian rivers as a function of dissolved nitrogen (N) in water. To this model, we mathematically add a pre-existing model of diffusively emitted denitrified dinitrogen (also as a function of dissolved N) from streams in the United States of America (USA). The resulting model predicts denitrified dinitrogen water-air emission from inland waters in the USA, China and Germany.

Dinitrogen Gas Emission, Inland Waters, Bubbles, Diffusion, Nitrogen Cycle, Denitrification

Sikar, E. , dos Santos, M. and dos Santos, E. (2019) An Empirical Model for Dinitrogen Gas Emission from Inland Waters. Atmospheric and Climate Sciences, 9, 1-25. doi: 10.4236/acs.2019.91001.