A063-0007
Distribution and Sources of Tropospheric Aerosols Over the Western North Atlantic During ACTIVATE (February-March 2020)

Wednesday, 9 December 2020
Poster
Hongyu Liu1, Bo Zhang1, Richard Moore2, Luke D Ziemba2, Hyundeok Choi1, David Painemal3, Hailong Wang4, Armin Sorooshian5, Johnathan W Hair2, Richard Anthony Ferrare2, Ewan Crosbie2,6, Michael Shook2, Amy Jo Scarino2,7, Chris A Hostetler2, Gao Chen8, Mary M Kleb2, Thomas Duncan Fairlie2, Jason Lucas Tackett2, Mark Vaughan2, Glenn S Diskin8, John B Nowak2 and Joshua P DiGangi2, (1)National Institute of Aerospace, Hampton, VA, United States, (2)NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, United States, (3)SSAI /NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, United States, (4)Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, United States, (5)University of Arizona, Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Tucson, AZ, United States, (6)Science Systems and Applications, Inc., Hampton, VA, United States, (7)Science Systems and Applications, Inc. Hampton, Hampton, VA, United States, (8)NASA Langley Research Ctr, Hampton, VA, United States
Abstract:
The Aerosol Cloud meTeorology Interactions oVer the western ATlantic Experiment (ACTIVATE) is a five-year (2019-2023) NASA Earth-Venture Suborbital-3 (EVS-3) mission to robustly characterize aerosol-cloud-meteorology interactions during February-June, with a focus on marine boundary layer clouds. This characterization requires understanding of aerosol composition, distribution, transport pathways, and sources. Here we use the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model driven by the MERRA-2 reanalysis to simulate tropospheric carbon monoxide (CO) and aerosols over the western North Atlantic Ocean (WNAO) during the first field deployment of ACTIVATE (February-March 2020). CO is used as a tracer to diagnose transport pathways for continental pollution outflow to the WNAO. The aerosol simulation represents all major aerosols including sulfate-nitrate-ammonium (SNA), mineral dust, sea salt, black and organic carbon aerosols. Model-simulated mixing ratios of SNA and organic carbon are compared with aircraft observations. We show that intensive aerosol mass measurements in the lower troposphere over the North American outflow region during ACTIVATE provide strong constraints on model aerosol wet scavenging. Comparisons of model aerosol extinctions with the airborne High Spectral Resolution Lidar-2 (HSRL-2) measurements indicate that the model generally captures continental outflow of aerosols and enhanced extinctions associated with sea salt. Simulated aerosol optical depths (AODs) and extinction vertical profiles are also compared with satellite retrievals from MODIS/Aqua and CALIOP/CALIPSO, respectively. CALIOP sometimes observes enhanced aerosol extinction at altitudes between ~1.5km and ~2.0km south of 32°N. The model reproduces this enhancement and attributes it to coarse-mode sea salt associated with high relative humidity. The relative contributions of continental and oceanic sources to the aerosol loading, AOD, and their distributions over the study domain will also be discussed.
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