Abstract

Leveraging aerosol data from multiple airborne and surface-based field campaigns encompassing diverse environmental conditions, we calculate statistics of the oxalate-sulfate mass ratio (median: 0.0217; 95% confidence interval: 0.0154–0.0296; R = 0.76; N = 2,948). Ground-based measurements of the oxalate-sulfate ratio fall within our 95% confidence interval, suggesting the range is robust within the mixed layer for the submicrometer particle size range. We demonstrate that dust and biomass burning emissions can separately bias this ratio toward higher values by at least one order of magnitude. In the absence of these confounding factors, the 95% confidence interval of the ratio may be used to estimate the relative extent of aqueous processing by comparing inferred oxalate concentrations between air masses, with the assumption that sulfate primarily originates from aqueous processing.

Department

Earth Systems Research Center

Publication Date

11-24-2021

Journal Title

Geophysical Research Letters

Publisher

AGU

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2021GL096520

Document Type

Article

Comments

This is an author's manuscript of an article published by AGU in 2021 in Geophysical Research Letters, available online: https://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2021GL096520

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