Water Accommodation and Desorption Kinetics on Ice
Journal article, 2014

The interaction of water vapor with ice remains incompletely understood despite its importance in environmental processes. A particular concern is the probability for water accommodation on the ice surface, for which results from earlier studies vary by more than 2 orders of magnitude. Here, we apply an environmental molecular beam method to directly determine water accommodation and desorption kinetics on ice. Short D2O gas pulses collide with H2O ice between 170 and 200 K, and a fraction of the adsorbed molecules desorbs within tens of milliseconds by first order kinetics. The bulk accommodation coefficient decreases nonlinearly with increasing temperature and reaches 0.41 +/- 0.18 at 200 K. The kinetics are well described by a model wherein water molecules adsorb in a surface state from which they either desorb or become incorporated into the bulk ice structure. The weakly bound surface state affects water accommodation on the ice surface with important implications for atmospheric cloud processes.

Author

Xiangrui Kong

University of Gothenburg

Panos Papagiannakopoulos

University of Gothenburg

Erik S Thomson

University of Gothenburg

Nikola Markovic

Chalmers, Chemical and Biological Engineering, Physical Chemistry

Jan B. C. Pettersson

University of Gothenburg

Journal of Physical Chemistry A

1089-5639 (ISSN) 1520-5215 (eISSN)

Vol. 118 22 3973-3979

Subject Categories

Chemical Sciences

DOI

10.1021/jp503504e

More information

Created

10/7/2017