A41K-0217
Sources and Distributions of Secondary Aerosols over the Northeastern United States during the WINTER Aircraft Campaign.
Thursday, 17 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Viral Shah1, Lyatt Jaegle2, Jessica Haskins3, Pedro Campuzano Jost4, Jason Clay Schroder5, Jose L Jimenez6, Amy Sullivan7, Rodney J Weber8, Jack E Dibb9, Jaime Ross Green10, Marc Nicholas Fiddler11, Solomon Bililign10, Felipe Lopez-Hilfiker1, Ben H. Lee1, Patrick R Veres12 and Joel A Thornton13, (1)University of Washington Seattle Campus, Seattle, WA, United States, (2)Univ Washington, Seattle, WA, United States, (3)University of Washington Seattle Campus, Atmospheric Sciences, Seattle, WA, United States, (4)University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, (5)Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Boulder, CO, United States, (6)University of Colorado at Boulder, Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Boulder, CO, United States, (7)Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, United States, (8)Georgia Institute of Technology Main Campus, Atlanta, GA, United States, (9)University of New Hampshire Main Campus, Durham, NH, United States, (10)North Carolina A & T State University, Physics, Greensboro, NC, United States, (11)North Carolina A & T State University, NOAA-ISET Center, Greensboro, NC, United States, (12)NOAA Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, (13)Univ Washington - Seattle, Seattle, WA, United States
Abstract:
Atmospheric aerosols harm public health, reduce visibility, and alter the Earth’s climate. A significant fraction of the aerosol burden is composed of secondary aerosols formed from gas-phase precursors such as SO2, NOx, NH3, and VOC’s. The formation and composition of secondary aerosols depends on precursor abundance, oxidant availability, and the thermodynamic properties of the semi-volatile species. The oxidation and thermodynamic processes are strongly dependent on the available sunlight, temperature, and humidity, and produce large seasonal shifts in the aerosol characteristics. While most previous aircraft campaigns have studied these processes during summer, the Wintertime INvestigation of Transport, Emissions, and Reactivity (WINTER) campaign focuses on the wintertime chemical processes over the northeastern United States. A comprehensive dataset of gas- and particle-phase species was collected during the campaign using the NSF/NCAR C-130 aircraft in February-March 2015. We interpret these observations using the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model with a 1/4 degree latitude by 5/16 degree longitude nested-grid over North America. We present a comparison of the model results with the aircraft measurements, and examine the sources of secondary inorganic and organic aerosols observed during the campaign. We use the model results to investigate the consistency between the aircraft, surface and satellite observations of aerosol concentrations and optical depths. Furthermore, we use multi-year model simulations to understand the effect of the unusually cold weather in 2015 over the northeastern United States on the chemical environment observed during the campaign.
