Production Flux of Sea Spray Aerosol Gerrit De Leeuw, Edgar Andreas, Magdalena Anguelova, C
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Production flux of sea spray aerosol Gerrit de Leeuw, Edgar Andreas, Magdalena Anguelova, C. Fairall, Ernie Lewis, Colin O’Dowd, Michael Schulz, Stephen Schwartz To cite this version: Gerrit de Leeuw, Edgar Andreas, Magdalena Anguelova, C. Fairall, Ernie Lewis, et al.. Produc- tion flux of sea spray aerosol. Reviews of Geophysics, American Geophysical Union, 2011, 49(2), 10.1029/2010RG000349. hal-03201814 HAL Id: hal-03201814 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03201814 Submitted on 21 Apr 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. PRODUCTION FLUX OF SEA SPRAY AEROSOL Gerrit de Leeuw,1,2,3 Edgar L Andreas,4 Magdalena D. Anguelova,5 C. W. Fairall,6 Ernie R. Lewis,7 Colin O’Dowd,8 Michael Schulz,9,10 and Stephen E. Schwartz7 Received 3 August 2010; revised 9 December 2010; accepted 5 January 2011; published 7 May 2011. [1] Knowledge of the size‐ and composition‐dependent ments with micrometeorological techniques that use newly production flux of primary sea spray aerosol (SSA) particles developed fast optical particle sizers. Extensive measure- and its dependence on environmental variables is required ments show that water‐insoluble organic matter contributes for modeling cloud microphysical properties and aerosol substantially to the composition of SSA particles with r80 < radiative influences, interpreting measurements of particu- 0.25 mm and, in locations with high biological activity, can late matter in coastal areas and its relation to air quality, be the dominant constituent. Order‐of‐magnitude variation and evaluating rates of uptake and reactions of gases in remains in estimates of the size‐dependent production flux sea spray drops. This review examines recent research per- per white area, the quantity central to formulations of the tinent to SSA production flux, which deals mainly with pro- production flux based on the whitecap method. This varia- duction of particles with r80 (equilibrium radius at 80% tion indicates that the production flux may depend on quan- relative humidity) less than 1 mm and as small as 0.01 mm. tities such as the volume flux of air bubbles to the surface Production of sea spray particles and its dependence on con- that are not accounted for in current models. Variation in trolling factors has been investigated in laboratory studies estimates of the whitecap fraction as a function of wind that have examined the dependences on water temperature, speed contributes additional, comparable uncertainty to pro- salinity, and the presence of organics and in field measure- duction flux estimates. Citation: de Leeuw, G., E. L Andreas, M. D. Anguelova, C. W. Fairall, E. R. Lewis, C. O’Dowd, M. Schulz, and S. E. Schwartz (2011), Production flux of sea spray aerosol, Rev. Geophys., 49, RG2001, doi:10.1029/2010RG000349. 1. INTRODUCTION mechanism, to days for smaller particles, for which removal is primarily by precipitation. [2] Sea spray aerosol (SSA) consists of a suspension, in air, of particles that are directly produced at the sea surface. [3] SSA particles, because of their hygroscopicity and These particles exist mainly in the liquid phase (i.e., as size, function readily as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) drops). The radii of these particles vary from around 10 nm [e.g., Andreae and Rosenfeld, 2008, and references therein], to at least several millimeters, and the atmospheric residence and can thus play a major role in determining the number times vary from seconds to minutes for larger particles, for concentration and size distribution of drops in marine which gravitational sedimentation is the principal removal clouds. In the absence of perturbations by anthropogenic aerosols, SSA exerts an even stronger influence on cloud properties; thus understanding SSA is necessary to evaluate 1Climate Change Unit, Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki, the influences of anthropogenic aerosols on cloud reflectivity Finland. and persistence (so‐called indirect radiative forcing) and on 2Department of Physics, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. 3Department of Air Quality and Climate, TNO Built Environment precipitation. A major contributor to uncertainty in evalu- and Geosciences, Utrecht, Netherlands. ating the indirect forcing by anthropogenic aerosols is a lack 4Seattle Division, NorthWest Research Associates, Inc., Lebanon, of knowledge on the background natural aerosol and the New Hampshire, USA. 5Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D. C., USA. associated cloud properties. 6NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, Colorado, [4] SSA provides a major contribution to scattering of USA. electromagnetic radiation over much of the world’s oceans. 7Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, USA. 8School of Physics and Centre for Climate and Air Pollution The annual global average magnitude of upward scattering Studies, Environmental Change Institute, National University of Ireland, of radiation in the solar spectrum at wavelengths 0.3–4 mm Galway, Galway, Ireland. 9 by SSA particles, which results in a cooling influence on Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, ’ Gif‐sur‐Yvette, France. Earth s climate by decreasing the amount of radiation 10Now at Meteorologisk Institutt, Oslo, Norway. absorbed by the oceans, has been estimated in various investigations as 0.08–6Wm−2 [Lewis and Schwartz, 2004, Copyright 2011 by the American Geophysical Union. Reviews of Geophysics, 49, RG2001 / 2011 1of39 8755‐1209/11/2010RG000349 Paper number 2010RG000349 RG2001 RG2001 de Leeuw et al.: SEA SPRAY PRODUCTION RG2001 hereinafter LS04, p. 183]. Quantifying light scattering by that work published since LS04, including laboratory and SSA is thus important for understanding the perturbation field experimental results on sea spray production, on the by anthropogenic aerosols to Earth’s shortwave radiation enrichment in organic matter, and on the measurement and budget during the industrial period (so‐called aerosol direct parameterization of whitecap coverage, is critically exam- forcing) [Charlson et al., 1992; Intergovernmental Panel on ined and compared with results summarized by LS04 to Climate Change, 2007]. This cooling influence is partly identify progress. offset by absorption of longwave (thermal infrared) radiation [7] Throughout this paper, we follow the common con- [Reddy et al., 2005a; Satheesh and Moorthy, 2005]. Pro- vention of specifying the size of an SSA particle by its duction and properties of SSA as CCN are of interest also in equilibrium radius at a relative humidity (RH) of 80%, r80. proposals to modify climate to offset global warming For sea salt particles originating from seawater with typical (“geoengineering”) by alteration of the properties of marine salinity (34–36), r80 is about one‐half the radius at forma- clouds [e.g., Latham, 1990; Bower et al., 2006]. tion. For such particles, to good accuracy r80 =2rdry, where [5] SSA often dominates the mass concentration of marine rdry is the volume‐equivalent dry radius. A simple approx- aerosol, especially at locations remote from anthropogenic imation for the RH dependence of the equilibrium radius or other continental sources, and SSA is one of the dominant ratio of an SSA particle in the liquid phase r/r80 is aerosols globally (along with mineral dust) in terms of mass 1=3 emitted into the atmosphere. Estimates of global annual r ¼ : : þ 1 ; ð Þ 0 54 1 0 À 1 mass emission of sea salt (calculated as the integral over the r80 1 h size‐distributed number production flux times the volume ≡ per particle times the mass of sea salt per unit volume of where h is the fractional relative humidity (h RH/100) seawater) with current chemical transport models (CTMs) [LS04, p. 54]. This equation applies in situations for which and global climate models (GCMs), using various para- the effect of surface tension can be neglected (i.e., particles meterizations of the sea spray source function (SSSF), range sufficiently large and RH sufficiently low); for other situa- over nearly 2 orders of magnitude, from 0.02 to 1 × 1014 kg yr−1 tions a more detailed treatment is required [Lewis, 2008]. (Figure 1 and Table 1) [Textor et al., 2006]. Much of this [8] SSA particles are considered in three distinct size variation is due to the different dependences on wind speed ranges based on their behavior in the atmosphere and con- and to the upper size limit of the particles included. This wide siderations of the processes that affect this behavior [e.g., ] m m ] range emphasizes the necessity of specifying the particle size LS04, p. 11]: r80 1 m for small SSA particles, 1 m ] m m ] range and the height or residence time in reporting sea r80 25 m for medium SSA particles, and 25 m r80 for spray emission fluxes. Critical analysis of SSA production large SSA particles. This review is restricted to particles ] m leads to the conclusions that there are large uncertainties in with r80 25 m. Special attention is paid to new infor- SSA fluxes and that SSSF parameterizations must be mation on composition, concentration, and production of m viewed as little more than order‐of‐magnitude estimates SSA particles with r80 < 0.1 m. [Hoppel et al., 2002; LS04, section 5.11]. [9] Many measurements indicate that the relative con- centrations of the major solutes in sea spray particles are [6] In the past several years, the contribution of organic species to SSA has been quantitatively examined in labo- similar to their relative concentrations in bulk seawater, ratory studies and field measurements, and measurements of although this may not be the situation for some substances SSA concentrations and production have been extended to as a consequence of the formation process or of exchange sizes smaller than were previously thought to be important.