Abstract
Marine aerosols play an important role in the Earth’s climate, but their effects remain highly uncertain due to a poor understanding of their sources, properties, and atmospheric processing, partly due to limited measurements. The Coastal Fog study investigated the processes controlling the formation and properties of fog in the North Atlantic Ocean. As part of this study, aerosol-particle-size distributions and chemical composition were measured off the shore of the north-eastern United States and Atlantic Canada, and used to investigate the sources and processes affecting the observed aerosols. Processed marine air during the study was characterized by single and bimodal aerosol size distributions. Aerosols in the port city of St. John’s, Newfoundland likely reflected local emissions built up due to poor ventilation, whereas aerosols observed in Halifax, Nova Scotia were likely affected by transport, cloud processing and precipitation. Finally, two particle-growth events were observed. The first event captured the appearance of 10-nm particles that grew to 30 nm over 4 h. These aerosols appeared to be newly formed in the upper portion of the boundary layer with influence from the free troposphere before subsiding to the surface. In the second event, 45-nm particles grew to 70 nm over 8 h. Our observations provide important insight into the processes affecting marine aerosols and highlight the crucial role of boundary-layer meteorology.
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded by Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-18-1-2472 as a Multidisciplinary Initiative, the Ocean Frontier Institute through an award from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Nova Scotia Research and Innovation Trust. We would like to acknowledge Jonathan Abbatt and Jong Sung Kim for the use of their equipment, Lisa Azzarello for extracting and analysing the MOUDI samples, the Harold I Schiff Graduate Award in Atmospheric Chemistry for funding L. Salehpoor, and the crew of the research vessel Hugh R. Sharp.
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Chisholm, N., Nagare, B., Wainwright, C. et al. Characterizing Atmospheric Aerosols off the Atlantic Canadian Coast During C-FOG. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 181, 345–364 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-021-00673-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-021-00673-7