Latitudinal and Seasonal Distribution of Particulate MSA over the Atlantic using a Validated Quantification Method with HR-ToF-AMS

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• 作者：Shan HuangLaurent Poulain ; Dominik van Pinxteren ; Manuela van Pinxteren ; Zhijun Wu ; Hartmut Herrmann ; Alfred Wiedensohler
• 刊名：Environmental Science & Technology
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：January 3, 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：51
• 期：1
• 页码：418-426
• 全文大小：500K
• ISSN：1520-5851

文摘

Methanesulfonic acid (MSA) has been widely used as a proxy for marine biogenic sources, but it is still a challenge to provide an accurate MSA mass concentration with high time resolution. This study offers an improved MSA quantification method using high resolution time-of-flight aerosol mass spectrometer (HR-ToF-AMS). Particularly, the method was validated based on an excellent agreement with parallel offline measurements (slope = 0.88, R² = 0.89). This comparison is much better than those using previously reported methods, resulting in underestimations of 31–54% of MSA concentration. With this new method, MSA mass concentrations were obtained during 4 North/South Atlantic cruises in spring and autumn of 2011 and 2012. The seasonal and spatial variation of the particulate MSA mass concentration as well as the MSA to non-sea-salt sulfate ratio (MSA:nssSO₄) over the North/South Atlantic Ocean were determined for the first time. Seasonal variation of the MSA mass concentration was observed, with higher values in spring (0.03 μg m^–3) than in autumn (0.01 μg m^–3). The investigation of MSA:nssSO₄ suggests a ubiquitous and significant influence of anthropogenic sources on aerosols in the marine boundary layer.