Periodic Reporting for period 1 - NPF-PANDA (New Particle Formation in Polluted Atmospheres by Nanocluster Dynamics Assessment)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2020-05-01 do 2022-04-30
These particles can subsequently influence the climate by altering cloud formation processes and they impact human health by contributing to air pollution. However, it was unknown how this clustering of vapours can occur under heavily polluted conditions as the clusters would rapidly adhere to larger pre-existing aerosol particles such as soot. Understanding new particle formation under challenging condtions will help to quantify its contribution to air pollution and help to shape future mitigation strategies. The overall objective of NPF-PANDA was to identify if rapid cluster growth occurs in polluted environments such that the newly formed particles can escape the scavenging. NPF-PANDA proposed to use a novel combination of several instruments for cluster concentration measurments to resolve the dynamics of these growing clusters.
NPF-PANDA convincingly showed that rapid cluster growth in urban and polluted environments can indeed explain the observed survival of clusters besides their high losses towards pre-existing particles. We showed that increasing precision in cluster measurements through our analyis tools, the application of several instruments and novel instrumental developement point indeed towards the fact that clusters in highly polluted conditions grow faster than previously thought. We further demonstrated that this can result in the necessary survival of these clusters both in chamber experiments and the ambient. Beyond that, we showed that new particle formation is indeed a crucial contributor to air pollution patterns. Furthermore, we could clarify how it changed under the Covid-19 lockdown periods, potentially giving a glance towards a future, less-polluted atmosphere and the role of new particle formation within it.
We disseminated our findings in 13 peer-reviewed scientfic journal articles (with another 5 articles being already submitted, accepted or published as preprints) and on three international conferences. We also brought our results to a wider public by participation in workshops and outreach events, the maintainance of a blog and twitter account and within a nation-wide Austrian newspaper article.