The natural aerosol over Northern Europe and its relation to anthropogenic emissions—implications of important climate feedbacks

We use a recently developed parametrization to estimate the regional particle field in the summer time troposphere over Scandinavia that would result if the forest were the only source of particles. The calculated field is compared with available observational data. It is concluded that the needle leaf forest above 58°N alone is capable of producing aerosol mass concentrations corresponding to 12–50% of today's values in the boundary layer over Scandinavia. We also demonstrate that the forest itself could produce up to 200 CCN per cubic centimetre on average over Scandinavia and further show that an increase in temperature by 5.8 °C compared to today's average temperature could increase this CCN population by 40%. The study shows that we are able to approximate the natural aerosol field resulting from biogenic emissions over the boreal forest in the northern hemispheric region. This information provide an important contribution in the evaluation of the climate effect caused by anthropogenic emissions of particles over the forest and also opens the possibility to better address the climate feedbacks believed to be associated with the boreal region.     

Annual and interannual variation in boreal forest aerosol particle number and volume concentration and their connection to particle formation

We investigated size-resolved submicrometre aerosol particle number and volume concentration time series as well as aerosol dynamic parameters derived from Differential Mobility Particle Sizer (DMPS) measurements at five background stations in the Nordic boreal forest area. The stations in question were Aspvreten, Hyytiälä and Utö in southern Finland and Sweden, and Värriö and Pallas in the Finnish Lapland. The objective of our investigation was to identify and quantify annual and interannual variation observable in the time series. We found that the total number and mass concentrations were much lower at the Lapland stations than at the southern stations and that the total particle number was strongly correlated to particle formation event frequency. The annual total number concentration followed the annual distribution of particle formation events at the southern stations but much less clearly at the Lapland stations. The volume concentration was highest during summer, in line with higher condensation growth rates; this is in line with the assumption that a large part of the particle volume is produced by oxidized plant emissions. The decrease of sulphate emissions in Europe was not visible in our data set. Aerosol dynamic parameters such as condensation sink, condensation sink diameter and the power law exponent linking coagulation losses and condensation sink are presented to characterize the submicron Nordic background aerosol.