The thermodynamic and kinetic impacts of organics on marine aerosols

Organics can change the manner in which aerosols scatter radiation directly as hydrated aerosols and indirectly as in-cloud activated aerosols, through changing the solution activity, the surface tension, and the accommodation coefficient of the hydrated aerosol. This work explores the kinetic and thermodynamic impacts of the organic component of marine aerosols through data collected over four field campaigns and through several models used to reproduce observations.; The Rough Evaporation Duct (RED) project was conducted in the summer of 2001 off the coast of Oahu using the Twin Otter Aircraft and the Floating Instrument Platform research platform for data collection. The Cloud-Aerosol Research in the Marine Atmosphere (CARMA) campaigns were conducted over three summers (2002, 2004, 2005) off the coast of Monterey, California. During the CARMA campaigns, a thick, moist, stratocumulus deck was present during most days, and the Twin Otter Aircraft was the primary research platform used to collect data. However, the research goals and exact instrumentation onboard the Twin Otter varied from campaign to campaign, and each data set was analyzed individually.; Data collected from CARMA I were used to explore the mechanism of oxalic acid production in cloud droplets. Oxalate was observed in the clouds in excess to below cloud concentrations by an average of 0.11 mug m-3, suggesting an in-cloud production. The tentative identification in cloud water of an intermediate species in the aqueous oxalate production mechanism lends further support to an in-cloud oxalate source.; The data sets collected during the RED campaign and the CARMA II and CARMA III campaigns were used to investigate the impact of aerosol chemical speciation on aerosol hygroscopic behavior. Several models were used to correlate the observations in the subsaturated regime to theory including an explicit thermodynamic model, simple Kohler theory, and a parameterization of the solution activity. These models were also applied to a cloud parcel model to examine cloud condensation nuclei closure. The best agreement was found when the solution activity was calculated using Svenningsson's model estimates, suggesting the nonlinear impact of organics on solution activity is the most important impact of organics on the marine aerosol.