Abstract
Naturally-occurring and artificial radionuclides in PM10 aerosol samples have been systematically measured for more than 12 years at the “O. Vittori” observatory, a baseline station located in a crucial position in the middle of the Mediterranean basin under the influence of relevant atmospheric streamers crossing in this area. The database collected and herein described covers PM10 mass load, 7Be and 210Pb, while sporadic samples showed the occurrence of artificial radionuclides as a result of accidents such as the tsunami induced Fukushima nuclear accident or the Algeciras non-nuclear 137Cs release. The principal scope of radioactivity monitoring at CMN has been the study of Stratosphere to Troposphere Exchange, mainly based on the variation of cosmogenic 7Be, while the availability of 210Pb as well of the mass load of PM10 allowed to extend the efficiency of radiotracer data to the identification of continental aerosol sources such as Saharan dust and the Balkan region. Extensive work has been and is still in progress based on the collected dataset concerning the application of global circulation models which rely on the support of objective tracers for their validation.
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- 1.
World Meteorological Organization.
- 2.
The most widely adopted time resolution in airborne radionuclide monitoring is on a weekly basis, which typically smooths out fluctuation due to meteorological variability leading to a remarkable loss of information.
- 3.
TSP stands for Total Suspended Particulate, i.e. ambient aerosol samples collected without any size cut-off.
- 4.
Until the 60’s it was believed that the main source of tropospheric ozone was the stratosphere.
- 5.
The potential vorticity is defined as the specific volume times the scalar product of the absolute vorticity vector and the gradient of potential temperature. It can be described as the absolute circulation of an air parcel that is enclosed between two isentropic surfaces. Within the troposphere, the values of PV are usually low, while PV rapidly increases from the troposphere to the stratosphere due to the significant change in static stability.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge Italian Air Force Meteorological Office (IAFMS) and CNR-ISAC for their precious technical support at the station. CNR-ISAC is gratefully acknowledged for providing infrastructural access at the station. We also acknowledge Dr. Ubaldo Bonafé (CNR-ISAC), Dr. Paolo Bonasoni (CNR-ISAC), Dr. Francescopiero Calzolari (CNR-ISAC), Dr. Paolo Cristofanelli (CNR-ISAC), Dr. Miguel-Angel Hernández-Ceballos (JRC ISPRA), Dr. Giorgia Cinelli, Dr. Hsi-Na Lee (U.S. Department of Homeland Security), Dr. Hongyu Liu (NIA/NASA), Dr. Olivier Masson (IRSN), Prof. Angelo Riccio (University of Napoli Parthenope), and Prof. José Antonio Garcia-Orza (Universidad Miguel Hernandez de Elche) for precious research collaborations. The authors gratefully acknowledge the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) for the provision of the HYSPLIT transport and dispersion model used in this publication.
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Cristofanelli, P. et al. (2018). Studies on Environmental Radionuclides at Mt. Cimone. In: High-Mountain Atmospheric Research . SpringerBriefs in Meteorology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61127-3_4
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