Investigation of aerosol components influencing atmospheric transfer of UV radiation in Baltic Sea region

Abstract

Linking of atmospheric aerosol size distributions and optical properties via predefined aerosol components was investigated. The measured aerosol volume distributions were decomposed to Optical Properties of Aerosols and Clouds (OPAC) components, and aerosol optical properties were calculated for a mixture of those components. The obtained aerosol optical properties were then used for modeling the surface UV irradiances with the libRadtran radiative transfer code. The results were verified with the columnar aerosol characteristics obtained from Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) station Tõravere (58.26°N, 26.46°E) and clear‐sky surface UV measurements in Pärnu, Estonia (58.38°N, 24.51°E). The best decomposition results were obtained with four OPAC components, when their lookup characteristics varied within ±10%. Variation of aerosol optical properties in 17 days was influenced by the following aerosol components: soot, 1.2 ± 1.4%; insoluble, 23.1 ± 8.3%; water‐soluble, 44.0 ± 10.8%; accumulation mode sea salt, 31.6 ± 6.2% of total aerosol volume. The average refractive index (for λ = 440 nm) of the component mixture was of 1.42 − 0.013i. Interpretation of the soot component was disputable, since similarly high soot concentrations corresponded to the secondary particles in polluted atmosphere and the nucleation bursts in clean atmosphere. The sea‐salt component showed a correlation with the aerosol residence time over sea. The water‐soluble component and the additional “biomass haze” component represented partly the same aerosol volume in the diameter range of 0.18–1.8 μm. The surface UV irradiances modeled with the AERONET data and the fitted aerosol components were highly correlated with each other, but both model results underestimated the UV extinction by aerosol.