Arctic marine secondary organic aerosol contributes significantly to summertime particle size distributions in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago

• Published in: Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
• Main Authors: B. Croft, R. V. Martin, W. R. Leaitch, J. Burkart, R. Y.-W. Chang, D. B. Collins, P. L. Hayes, A. L. Hodshire, L. Huang, J. K. Kodros, A. Moravek, E. L. Mungall, J. G. Murphy, S. Sharma, S. Tremblay, G. R. Wentworth, M. D. Willis, J. P. D. Abbatt, J. R. Pierce
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2019
• Subjects: Physics; QC1-999; Chemistry; QD1-999; Arctic; Canadian Arctic Archipelago; Eureka; Arctic Archipelago
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-2787-2019; https://doaj.org/article/8d805a5f46e8493eb75da09e1bdabf10

Summertime Arctic aerosol size distributions are strongly controlled by natural regional emissions. Within this context, we use a chemical transport model with size-resolved aerosol microphysics (GEOS-Chem-TOMAS) to interpret measurements of aerosol size distributions from the Canadian Arctic Archipelago during the summer of 2016, as part of the “NETwork on Climate and Aerosols: Addressing key uncertainties in Remote Canadian Environments” (NETCARE) project. Our simulations suggest that condensation of secondary organic aerosol (SOA) from precursor vapors emitted in the Arctic and near Arctic marine (ice-free seawater) regions plays a key role in particle growth events that shape the aerosol size distributions observed at Alert (82.5 ∘ N, 62.3 ∘ W), Eureka (80.1 ∘ N, 86.4 ∘ W), and along a NETCARE ship track within the Archipelago. We refer to this SOA as Arctic marine SOA (AMSOA) to reflect the Arctic marine-based and likely biogenic sources for the precursors of the condensing organic vapors. AMSOA from a simulated flux (500 <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M5" display="inline" overflow="scroll" dspmath="mathml"><mrow class="unit"><mi mathvariant="normal">µ</mi><mi mathvariant="normal">g</mi><mspace linebreak="nobreak" width="0.125em"/><msup><mi mathvariant="normal">m</mi><mrow><mo>-</mo><mn mathvariant="normal">2</mn></mrow></msup><mspace linebreak="nobreak" width="0.125em"/><msup><mi mathvariant="normal">day</mi><mrow><mo>-</mo><mn mathvariant="normal">1</mn></mrow></msup></mrow></math> <svg:svg xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="64pt" height="15pt" class="svg-formula" dspmath="mathimg" md5hash="8f93b7fde00f18c6b1eb9f6df658301c"><svg:image xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="acp-19-2787-2019-ie00001.svg" width="64pt" height="15pt" ...