SGER: Exploration for Aerosols in Nucleated Marine Coastal Environment

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This project is making exploratory field observations of aerosols at a relatively unpolluted but biologically rich intertidal coastal location in the Gulf of Alaska. The objective is to explore the nucleation, subsequent growth, and cloud nucleating properties of aerosols to determine the contribution of this source to the "background" tropospheric aerosol population. Observations at another location have suggested that, at low tide, there may be substantial new particle production by homogeneous nucleation and heterogeneous growth of particles at such a site. This project will explore this possibility and, if such particle production is observed, will establish the basis for a future multidisciplinary project to explore the nucleation process in greater detail. The specific objectives are to determine if there is substantial new-particle production during low tide, and to determine if the bursts show evidence of being correlated with tidal phase, to determine the association of the newly formed particles to sunlight intensity and meteorological conditions, and to measure the growth rates of newly nucleated embryos. The project is also producing a climatological record of the aerosol size distribution for the clean coastal Alaskan environment.The primary broader impact of this award is likely to be the demonstration of feasibility of a project that has the potential to involve many other investigators and can help improve understanding of aerosol sources in clean regions. These aerosols have widespread effects on cloud properties, radiative transfer in the atmosphere, and heterogeneous chemistry in the atmosphere, so improved understanding of their sources may lead to improvements in the ways they are represented in models of atmospheric processes.