Abstract
Recent laboratory and modeling studies suggest high relevance of aerosol mixing state and particle morphology for the life cycle of atmospheric aerosols. A new article by Gorkowski and colleagues presents a framework to predict morphologies of aerosol particles based on O:C ratio for incorporation into chemical transport models.
Highlights
A new article by Gorkowski, Donahue, and Sullivan [3] presents aerosol optical tweezer (AOT) experiments to study the resulting morphologies when SOA particles collide with a levitated micrometer-sized droplet under controlled temperature and relative humidity (RH) conditions
What are the implications of the findings by Gorkowski and coworkers for atmospheric aging of air masses? Figure 1 illustrates an atmospheric scenario where background aerosol first mixes with traffic and biogenic emissions followed by cloud processing
Since freshly emitted POA is barely oxidized (O:C < 0.36), its semivolatile vapors are hardly absorbed by oxidized background particles, yet, some POA may coagulate with background particles yielding partially engulfed morphology
Summary
A new article by Gorkowski, Donahue, and Sullivan [3] presents aerosol optical tweezer (AOT) experiments to study the resulting morphologies when SOA particles collide with a levitated micrometer-sized droplet under controlled temperature and relative humidity (RH) conditions. Background particles are assumed to consist of sulfates and nitrates partially neutralized by ammonia and homogeneously mixed with aged organic compounds with average O:C > 0.8. Traffic emits particles (POA) that partially volatilize while they dilute [6].
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