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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

We present the first data on the concentration of sea-salt aerosol throughout most of the depth of the troposphere and over a wide range of latitudes, which were obtained during the Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission. Sea-salt concentrations in the upper troposphere are very small, usually less than 10 ng per standard m3 (about 10 parts per trillion by mass) and often less than 1 ng m−3. This puts stringent limits on the contribution of sea-salt aerosol to halogen and nitric acid chemistry in the upper troposphere. Within broad regions the concentration of sea-salt aerosol is roughly proportional to water vapor, supporting a dominant role for wet scavenging in removing sea-salt aerosol from the atmosphere. Concentrations of sea-salt aerosol in the winter upper troposphere are not as low as in the summer and the tropics. This is mostly a consequence of less wet scavenging in the drier, colder winter atmosphere. There is also a source of sea-salt aerosol over pack ice that is distinct from that over open water. With a well-studied and widely distributed source, sea-salt aerosol provides an excellent test of wet scavenging and vertical transport of aerosols in chemical transport models.

Department

Earth Systems Research Center

Publication Date

4-2-2019

Journal Title

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

Publisher

EGU

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://dx.doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-4093-2019

Document Type

Article

Comments

This is an open access article published by EGU in 2019 in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, available online: https://dx.doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-4093-2019

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