A43C-0298
How much does sea spray aerosol organic matter impact clouds and radiation? Sensitivity studies in the Community Atmosphere Model

Thursday, 17 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Susannah M Burrows1, Xiaohong Liu2, Scott Elliott3, Richard C Easter4, Balwinder Singh1 and Philip J Rasch1, (1)Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, United States, (2)University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, United States, (3)Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, United States, (4)Battelle PNNL, Richland, WA, United States
Abstract:
Submicron marine aerosol particles are frequently observed to contain substantial fractions of organic material, hypothesized to enter the atmosphere as part of the primary sea spray aerosol formed through bubble bursting. This organic matter in sea spray aerosol may affect cloud condensation nuclei and ice nuclei concentrations in the atmosphere, particularly in remote marine regions. Members of our team have developed a new, mechanistic representation of the enrichment of sea spray aerosol with organic matter, the OCEANFILMS parameterization (Burrows et al., 2014). This new representation uses fields from an ocean biogeochemistry model to predict properties of the emitted aerosol. We have recently implemented the OCEANFILMS representation of sea spray aerosol composition into the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM), and performed sensitivity experiments and comparisons with alternate formulations. Early results from these sensitivity simulations will be shown, including impacts on aerosols, clouds, and radiation.

References:

Burrows, S. M., Ogunro, O., Frossard, A. A., Russell, L. M., Rasch, P. J., and Elliott, S. M.: A physically based framework for modeling the organic fractionation of sea spray aerosol from bubble film Langmuir equilibria, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 14, 13601-13629, doi:10.5194/acp-14-13601-2014, 2014.