Aging of biogenic secondary organic aerosol via gas-phase OH radical reactions.

The Multiple Chamber Aerosol Chemical Aging Study (MUCHACHAS) tested the hypothesis that hydroxyl radical (OH) aging significantly increases the concentration of first-generation biogenic secondary organic aerosol (SOA). OH is the dominant atmospheric oxidant, and MUCHACHAS employed environmental chambers of very different designs, using multiple OH sources to explore a range of chemical conditions and potential sources of systematic error. We isolated the effect of OH aging, confirming our hypothesis while observing corresponding changes in SOA properties. The mass increases are consistent with an existing gap between global SOA sources and those predicted in models, and can be described by a mechanism suitable for implementation in those models.

Aerosol chamber study of optical constants and N2O5 uptake on supercooled H2SO4/H2O/HNO3 solution droplets at polar stratospheric cloud temperatures.

The mechanism of the formation of supercooled ternary H(2)SO(4)/H(2)O/HNO(3) solution (STS) droplets in the polar winter stratosphere, i.e., the uptake of nitric acid and water onto background sulfate aerosols at T < 195 K, was successfully mimicked during a simulation experiment at the large coolable aerosol chamber AIDA of Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe. Supercooled sulfuric acid droplets, acting as background aerosol, were added to the cooled AIDA vessel at T = 193.6 K, followed by the addition of ozone and nitrogen dioxide. N(2)O(5), the product of the gas phase reaction between O(3) and NO(2), was then hydrolyzed in the liquid phase with an uptake coefficient gamma(N(2)O(5)). From this experiment, a series of FTIR extinction spectra of STS droplets was obtained, covering a broad range of different STS compositions. This infrared spectra sequence was used for a quantitative test of the accuracy of published infrared optical constants for STS aerosols, needed, for example, as input in remote sensing applications. The present findings indicate that the implementation of a mixing rule approach, i.e., calculating the refractive indices of ternary H(2)SO(4)/H(2)O/HNO(3) solution droplets based on accurate reference data sets for the two binary H(2)SO(4)/H(2)O and HNO(3)/H(2)O systems, is justified. Additional model calculations revealed that the uptake coefficient gamma(N(2)O(5)) on STS aerosols strongly decreases with increasing nitrate concentration in the particles, demonstrating that this so-called nitrate effect, already well-established from uptake experiments conducted at room temperature, is also dominant at stratospheric temperatures.