Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Ice nuclei in marine air: biogenic particles or dust?

• Main Authors: S. M. Burrows, C. Hoose, M. G. Lawrence
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: Southern Ocean
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.465.3606; http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/13/245/2013/acp-13-245-2013.pdf

Abstract. Ice nuclei impact clouds, but their sources and distribution in the atmosphere are still not well known. Par-ticularly little attention has been paid to IN sources in ma-rine environments, although evidence from field studies sug-gests that IN populations in remote marine regions may be dominated by primary biogenic particles associated with sea spray. In this exploratory model study, we aim to bring at-tention to this long-neglected topic and identify promising target regions for future field campaigns. We assess the likely global distribution of marine biogenic ice nuclei using a com-bination of historical observations, satellite data and model output. By comparing simulated marine biogenic immersion IN distributions and dust immersion IN distributions, we pre-dict strong regional differences in the importance of marine biogenic IN relative to dust IN. Our analysis suggests that marine biogenic IN are most likely to play a dominant role in determining IN concentrations in near-surface-air over the Southern Ocean, so future field campaigns aimed at investi-gating marine biogenic IN should target that region. Climate-related changes in the abundance and emission of biogenic marine IN could affect marine cloud properties, thereby in-troducing previously unconsidered feedbacks that influence the hydrological cycle and the Earth’s energy balance. Fur-thermore, marine biogenic IN may be an important aspect to consider in proposals for marine cloud brightening by artifi-cial sea spray production. 1