Atmospheric Aerosols: Source Apportionment, Characterizations, and Impacts

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

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