The Aerosol Coarse Mode: Its Importance for Light Scattering Enhancement and Columnar Optical Closure Studies

Abstract:

Ambient aerosol particles can take up water and thus change their optical properties depending on the hygroscopicity and the relative humidity (RH) of the surrounding air. Knowledge of the hygroscopicity effect is of importance for radiative forcing calculations but is also needed for the comparison or validation of remote sensing or model results with in situ measurements. Specifically, the particle light scattering depends on RH and can be described by the scattering enhancement factor f(RH), which is defined as the particle light scattering coefficient at defined RH divided by its dry value.

Here, we will present insights from measurements of f(RH) across Europe (Zieger et al., 2013) and will demonstrate why the coarse mode is important when modeling or predicting f(RH) from auxiliary aerosol in-situ measurements. We will show the implications by presenting the results of a recently performed columnar optical closure study (Zieger et al., 2015). This study linked ground-based in-situ measurements (with the help of airborne aerosol size distribution measurements) to columnar aerosol optical properties derived by a co-located AERONET sun photometer. The in situ derived aerosol optical depths (AOD) were clearly correlated with the directly measured values of the AERONET sun photometer but were substantially lower compared to the directly measured values (factor of ∼ 2–3). Differences became greater for longer wavelengths. The disagreement between in situ derived and directly measured AOD was hypothesized to originate from losses of coarse and fine mode particles through dry deposition within the forest’s canopy and losses in the in situ sampling lines. In addition, elevated aerosol layers from long-range transport were observed for parts of the campaign which could have explained some of the disagreement.

Zieger, P., Fierz-Schmidhauser, R., Weingartner, E., and Baltensperger, U.: Effects of relative humidity on aerosol light scattering: results from different European sites, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 13, 10609–10631, 2013.

Zieger, P. et al.: Low hygroscopic scattering enhancement of boreal aerosol and the implications for a columnar optical closure study, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 15, 7247-7267, 2015.