Meteorological observations and condensation nuclei measurements at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Research Station during three austral summers

• Main Authors: Herenz, Paul, Wex, Heike, Mangold, Alexander, Laffineur, Quentin, Gorodetskaya, Irina V, Fleming, Zoë L, Panagi, Marios, Stratmann, Frank
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2018
• Subjects: Antarctica; Monitoring station; MONS; PE_monitoring; PE_Station; Princess Elisabeth Station; Antarctic; Southern Ocean; The Antarctic; East Antarctica; Austral; Dronning Maud Land; Aitken; Antarc*
• Online Access: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.894841; https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.894841

For three austral summer seasons (2013-2016, each from December to February) aerosol particles arriving at the Belgian Antarctic research station Princess Elisabeth (PE), in Dronning Maud Land in East Antarctica were characterized. This included number concentrations of total aerosol particles (N[CN]) and cloud condensation nuclei (N[CCN]), the particle number size distribution (PNSD), the aerosol particle hygroscopicity and the influence of the air mass origin on N[CN] and N[CCN]. In general N[CN] was found to range from 40 to 6700 cm^-3 with a median of 333 cm^-3, while N[CCN] was found to cover a range between less than 10 and 1300 cm^-3 for supersaturations (SS) between 0.1 and 0.7%. It is shown that the aerosol is Aitken mode dominated, being characterized by a significant amount of small, and therefore likely secondarily formed aerosol particles, with 94% and 36% of the aerosol particles smaller than 90 nm and ~35 nm, respectively. Measurements of the basic meteorological parameters as well as the history of the air masses arriving at the measurement station indicate that the station is influenced by both, marine air masses originating from the Southern Ocean and coastal areas around Antarctica (marine events - MEs) and continental air masses (continental events - CEs). CEs, which were defined as times when the air masses spent at least 90% of the time during the last 10 days over the Antarctic continent, occurred during 61% of the time during which measurements were done. CEs came along with rather constant N[CN] and N[CCN] values, which we denote to be Antarctic continental background concentrations. MEs however cause large fluctuations in N[CN] and N[CCN] with low concentrations likely caused by scavenging due to precipitation and high concentrations likely originating from new particle formation (NPF) based on marine precursors. The application of HYSPLIT back trajectories in form of the potential source contribution function (PSCF) analysis indicate, that the region of the Southern Ocean is a ...