Sea Spray Aerosol Formation: Laboratory Results on the Role of Air Entrainment, Water Temperature, and Phytoplankton Biomass

Sigurd Christiansen, Matthew E. Salter, Elena Gorokhova, Quynh T. Nguyen, Merete Bilde

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

49 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Sea spray aerosol (SSA) emission is a complex process affected by various controlling factors. This work seeks to deconvolute some of this complexity in a controlled laboratory setting using a plunging jet by varying three key parameters, one at a time: (1) air entrainment rate, (2) seawater temperature, and (3) biomass of phytoplankton. The production of SSA is found to vary linearly with air entrainment rate. By normalizing the production flux to air entrainment rate, we observe nonlinear variation of the production efficiency of SSA with seawater temperature with a minimum around 6–10 °C. For comparison, SSA was also generated by detraining air into artificial seawater using a diffuser demonstrating that the production efficiency of SSA generated using a diffuser decreases almost linearly with increasing seawater temperature, and the production efficiency is significantly higher than that for SSA generated using a plunging jet. Finally, by varying the amount of phytoplankton biomass we demonstrate that SSA particle production varies nonlinearly with the amount of biomass in seawater.
Original languageAmerican English
Pages (from-to)13107–13116
Number of pages13
JournalEnvironmental Science & Technology
Volume53
Issue number22
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 19 Nov 2019

Keywords

  • sea spray aerosols

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