Objective Owing to their potential influence on climate atmospheric aerosol particles have received considerable attention during recent years. Their formation processes are thus of importance. Several air borne experiments have identified the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere as one of the major formation regions. The sulfate aerosol particles are formed via gas to particle conversion. As the primary mechanism that influences the number of particles is regarded the binary homogeneous nucleation of sulfuric acid and water. However, predicted nucleation rates are usually much lower than the nucleation rates inferred from particle measurements showing that our understanding of particle formation processes in the atmosphere is far from complete.Recently, ternary homogeneous nucleation and ion-mediated nucleation were suggested as nucleation mechanism, which may explain the gap between measurements and simulations. Further, measurements show that binary nucleation rates may be enhanced by atmospheric variability and mixing and may occur under conditions which are otherwise unfavourable for nucleation. Our intention of this proposal is to investigate nucleation and growth processes of sulfate aerosol in the atmosphere theoretically using model simulations but in close connection to available observations. Especially, we will investigate when, where and under which condition enhanced nucleation rates are occurring.We intend to compare our model results with measurements made during several measuring campaigns. This research will be carried out at the Department of Meteorology and the Institute of Applied Experimental Research at the University of Stockholm, which has a long established cooperation with the University of Helsinki. Therefore, an Intra-European cooperation between Sweden, Finland and Germany is resulting through this work and in particular the expertise of the applicant on this topic will be completed. Fields of science humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistorynatural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciencesozone depletionnatural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesmeteorologytroposphere Keywords formation growth mixing tropopause region Programme(s) FP6-MOBILITY - Human resources and Mobility in the specific programme for research, technological development and demonstration "Structuring the European Research Area" under the Sixth Framework Programme 2002-2006 Topic(s) MOBILITY-2.1 - Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowships (EIF) Call for proposal FP6-2002-MOBILITY-5 See other projects for this call Funding Scheme EIF - Marie Curie actions-Intra-European Fellowships Coordinator STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY EU contribution No data Address Arrhenius väg STOCKHOLM Sweden See on map Links Website Opens in new window Total cost No data
