Spatio-Temporal Distributions of the Natural Non-Sea-Salt Aerosol Over the Southern Ocean and Coastal Antarctica and Its Potential Source Regions

• Published in: Tellus. Series B, Chemical and physical meteorology Chemical and physical meteorology, 2023-09, Vol.75 (1), p.47-64
• Main Authors: Heintzenberg, Jost, Legrand, Michel, Gao, Yuan, Hara, Keiichiro, Huang, Shan, Humphries, Ruhi S., Kamra, Adarsh K., Keywood, Melita D., Sakerin, Sergey M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: aerosol sources; antarctica; biogenic marine emissions; Earth Sciences; major ions; Meteorology; Ocean, Atmosphere; particle composition; particle number concentrations; Sciences of the Universe; southern ocean
• ISSN: 1600-0889; 0280-6509; 1600-0889
• DOI: 10.16993/tellusb.1869

More than 40 years of aerosol data including concentrations of particle number and of nine major ions collected over the Southern Ocean and coastal stations have been aggregated and filtered with back trajectories to reduce the risk of influence from adjacent continents. That provided a rich dataset including latitudinal distribution and seasonality of physical and chemical aerosol parameters that allow insights into aerosol sources over the Southern Ocean. These data together with statistics of back trajectory paths of high (75% percentile) and low (25% percentile) concentrations of the studied aerosol parameters were used to identify potential source regions of the respective compounds. For particle number concentrations, MSA, and the non-seasalt fractions of Ca and potassium the most prominent source regions were found in high DMS-areas close to Antarctica, whereas the potential source regions of NH 4 and the non-sea-salt fraction of Mg were located in part further north over the Southern Ocean. These geographical differences would reflect differences in the marine biota.