Effect of corrections for water vapor sensitivity of coumarin targets and for density fluctuations (WPL) on O3 fluxes measured with the eddy covariance technique

Ozone vertical fluxes above land surfaces are commonly measured with the eddy covariance (EC) technique which requires non-conventional ozone fast analyzer mostly based on a chemiluminescence reaction of ozone with a reagent, either gaseous or solid. Currently, the most adopted reagent for this kind of O3 analyzers is a coumarin-47 solid dye absorbed on silica gel targets. However, ozone-induced chemiluminescence of coumarin-47 is enhanced by the presence of water vapor in the air sample. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the magnitude of the corrections to the ozone flux measurements due to coumarin-47 sensitivity to water vapor fluctuations, performed above a forest ecosystem from 2013 to 2020, and the combined effect with the WPL correction (Webb–Pearman–Leuning correction), another well-established correction for density fluctuations related to water vapor and sensible heat fluxes. Results confirm that water vapor sensitivity correction for the chemiluminescence reaction between coumarin-47 and ozone is quite small and negligible in most of the environmental conditions. On the contrary, WPL correction is almost one order of magnitude greater than the former correction. The combination of the two corrections results, on average, in a 6.6% reduction of the absolute value of the uncorrected ozone fluxes. Since the combined effect of the two corrections can be remarkable depending on the seasonal period of measurements, both corrections to the measured ozone fluxes are recommended, as well as the indication of their application in the published works.