Atmospheric Aerosols: Source Apportionment, Characterizations, and Impacts

A special issue of Atmosphere (ISSN 2073-4433). This special issue belongs to the section "Aerosols".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 June 2024 | Viewed by 1396

Special Issue Editors

State Key Laboratory of Cryospheric Sciences, Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730000, China
Interests: carbonaceous aerosol; cryospheric chemistry ; tropopause aerosol
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Atmospheric Sciences and Global Change Division, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99354, USA
Interests: black carbon; mineral dust; nitrate aerosol; aerosol–chemistry–climate interactions

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Atmospheric aerosols play important roles in regional air quality, as well as in Earth’s climate. They can impact Earth’s radiation budget, cloud properties, hydrological cycle, atmospheric chemistry, land run-off, and surface albedo. However, large uncertainties remain in estimating their short-term and climatic impacts on a regional and global scale. New knowledge of aerosol physical, combined with chemical characteristics gained from observational and modeling studies, can provide process-level insights and greatly improve model performance. Due to the importance of atmospheric aerosols in the Earth’s system, knowing their relative contributions from different source regions is also useful for a policy improving air quality and mitigating climate change.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Source attribution of anthropogenic aerosols (e.g., black carbon, primary/secondary organic aerosols, sulfate, and nitrate) and their climate impact (focusing on radiative forcing, temperature, and precipitation) on populated and/or polluted receptor regions (e.g, South Asia, East Asia), as well as on remote regions such as the Arctic and Antarctic.
  • Quantification and understanding of source sector contributions (e.g., residential, industrial, agriculture, and biomass burning) of anthropogenic aerosols to populated and/or polluted regions for policy making and air quality/climate mitigation plans.
  • Source attribution of mineral dust and its radiative forcing to understand the transport across the Pacific and Atlantic to remote regions.
  • Observational and modeling studies of aerosol physical and chemical characteristics, such as size, morphology, composition, hygroscopicity, and radiative properties, and their interactions with regional air quality and global climate.

Dr. Hewen Niu
Dr. Mingxuan Wu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • anthropogenic aerosols
  • radiative forcing
  • physical and chemical characteristics

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Review

18 pages, 2092 KiB  
Review
A Study of Chemical Processes of Nitrate in Atmospheric Aerosol and Snow Based on Stable Isotopes
by Mengxue Chen, Hewen Niu and Yankun Xiang
Atmosphere 2024, 15(1), 59; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos15010059 - 31 Dec 2023
Viewed by 927
Abstract
Nitrate (NO3) is a prominent atmospheric pollutant and a key chemical constituent of snow and ice, which plays a crucial role in the atmosphere and significantly impacts regional climate and environment conditions through a series of complex chemical processes. By [...] Read more.
Nitrate (NO3) is a prominent atmospheric pollutant and a key chemical constituent of snow and ice, which plays a crucial role in the atmosphere and significantly impacts regional climate and environment conditions through a series of complex chemical processes. By summarizing the recent research progress on the nitrate chemical process (particularly on the isotopic measurements of NO315N, Δ17O and δ18O)) in atmosphere and glacier snow, this study mainly investigated the chemical compositions and chemical processes, formation pathways, and photochemical reactions of nitrate in snow and atmosphere. Our results identified that the main ways of atmospheric nitrate formation are the hydrolysis of N2O5 and the reaction of ·OH with NO2; the spatial distribution of Δ17O and δ18O values of atmospheric nitrate have a significant latitudinal trend between 30° N–60° N; the study of stable isotopes (δ15N and δ18O) and the oxygen isotope anomaly (Δ17O) of nitrate have mainly been carried out over the densely populated and coastal mega cities; there exist significant gaps in the study of chemistry processes of nitrate in snow and ice and the air–snow interfaces across glaciated regions. This study provides a basic reference for more robust observations and research of nitrate in glacier areas in the future. Full article
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