Massive-scale aircraft observations of giant sea-salt aerosol particle size distributions in atmospheric marine boundary layers

Abstract:

iant sea-salt aerosol particles (dry radius, r_d > 0.5 μm) occur nearly everywhere in the marine boundary layer and frequently above. This study presents observations of atmospheric sea-salt size distributions in the range 0.7 < r_d < 14 μm based on external impaction of sea-spray aerosol particles onto microscope polycarbonate microscope slides. The slides have very large sample volumes, typically about 250 L over a 10-second sampling period. This provides unprecedented sampling of giant sea-salt particles for flights in marine boundary layer air.

The slides were subsequently analyzed in a humidified chamber using dual optical digital microscopy. At a relative humidity of 90% the sea-salt aerosol particles form spherical cap drops. Based on measurement the volume of the spherical cap drop and assuming NaCl composition, the Kohler equation is used to derive the dry salt mass of tens of thousands of individual aerosol particles on each slide. Size distributions are given with a 0.2 μm resolution.

The slides were exposed from the NSF/NCAR C-130 research aircraft during the 2008 VOCALS project off the coast of northern Chile and the 2011 ICE-T in the Caribbean. In each deployment, size distributions using hundreds of slides are used to relate fitted log-normal size distributions parameters to wind speed, altitude and other atmospheric conditions. The size distributions provide a unique observational set for initializing cloud models with coarse-mode aerosol particle observations for marine atmospheres.