Secondary Organic Aerosol from Biomass Burning Phenolics Could Increase Brown Carbon Lifetimes, Seed Ice Clouds, and Transport Pollutants

31 January 2023, Version 1
This content is a preprint and has not undergone peer review at the time of posting.

Abstract

Biomass burning events emit large amounts of phenolic compounds, which are oxidized in the atmosphere and form secondary organic aerosol (SOA). Using the poke-flow technique, we measured room-temperature and relative humidity (RH)-dependent viscosities of SOA generated by the oxidation of three biomass burning phenolic compounds: catechol, guaiacol, and syringol. All systems had viscosity < 3 × 10³ Pa s at RH ⪆ 40% and > 2 × 10⁸ Pa s at RH ⪅ 3%. At RH values of 0-10%, the viscosities of these SOA were at least 2 orders of magnitude higher than the viscosity of primary organic aerosol (POA) from biomass burning. These results suggest that mixing biomass burning SOA and POA may extend the lifetime of the brown carbon in the atmosphere. Based on an extrapolation of our results to tropospheric temperature and RH values, phenolic SOA is in a glassy state (𝜂 > 10¹² Pa s) above ∼6 km in the troposphere, potentially acting as heterogeneous ice nuclei in clouds, thereby influencing climate. Furthermore, the mixing time of organic molecules in a 200 nm phenolic SOA particle exceeds 1 h above 3 km in the troposphere, which has implications for the long-range transport of pollutants.

Keywords

secondary organic aerosol
biomass burning
phenolic
viscosity
mixing time

Supplementary materials

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Supporting Information
Description
Phenolic oxidation rates, figures of the poke-flow technique, the effect of conditioning time on viscosity measurements, measurements of particle cross-sections for the evaporation of SVOCs, inputs for the fluid dynamics simulations, flow time data, and details of the viscosity parameterization for phenolic BB-SOA.
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