Nitrogen Deposition onto the United States and Western Europe

Deposition data were acquired directly from monitoring programs in the United States and Europe covering time periods from 1978-1994 for wet deposition and from 1989-1994 for dry deposition and evaluated using similar quality assurance criteria to ensure comparability. A standard geostatistical method (kriging) was used to interpolate data onto a 0.5 x 0.5 degree resolution map for wet and dry deposition.

Analysis of N deposition for these regions was limited by sampling density, frequency, and coverage. These spatially explicit wet and dry N fluxes also provide a tool for verifying regional and global models of atmospheric chemistry and transport, and represent critical inputs into terrestrial models of biogeochemistry. These data can be used to construct continental scale N budgets and to evaluate recent modification of land-atmosphere N exchange and ecosystem function (Holland et al., 2004).