Construction of a unified, high-resolution nitrous oxide data set for ER-2 flights during SOLVE

Four nitrous oxide (N2O) instruments were part of the NASA ER‐2 aircraft payload during the 2000 SAGE‐III Ozone Loss and Validation Experiment (SOLVE). Coincident data from the three in situ instruments and a whole air sampler are compared. Agreement between these instruments was typically good; however, there are several types of important differences between the data sets. These differences prompted a collaborative effort to combine data from the three in situ instruments, using an objective method, to produce a self‐consistent, high‐resolution, unified N2O data set for each SOLVE flight. The construction method developed by the four N2O instrument teams is described in detail. An important step in this method is the evaluation and reduction of bias in each of the in situ data sets before they are combined. The quality of unified N2O data is examined through its agreement with high‐accuracy and high‐precision N2O data from whole air samples collected from the ER‐2 during SOLVE flights. Typical agreement between these two data sets is 2.9 ppb (1.5%), better than the typical agreement between any pair of N2O instruments.