Abstract. Long term statistics of atmospheric aerosol and especially cloud scavenging were studied at the Puijo measurement station in Kuopio, Finland, during October 2010–November 2014. Aerosol size distributions, scattering coefficients at three different wavelengths (450 nm, 550 nm, and 700 nm), and absorption coefficient at wavelength 637 nm were measured with a special inlet system to sample interstitial and total aerosol in clouds. On average, accumulation mode particle concentration was found to be temperature dependent with lowest average concentrations of 200 cm−3 around 0 °C increasing to more than 800 cm−3 for temperatures higher than 20 °C. From the in-cloud measurements, both scattering and absorbing material scavenging efficiencies were observed to have slightly increasing temperature dependence. At 0 °C the efficiencies of scattering and absorbing matter were 0.85 and 0.55 with slopes of 0.005 °C−1 and 0.003 °C−1, respectively. Additionally, scavenging efficiencies were studied as a function of the diameter at which half of the particles are activated into cloud droplets. This analysis indicated that the is a higher fraction of absorbing material, typically black carbon, in smaller sizes so that at least 20–30 % of interstitial particles within clouds consist of absorbing material. In addition, the PM1-inlet revealed that approximately 20 % of absorbing material was observed to reside in particles with ambient diameter larger than ~ 1 µm at relative humidity below 90 %. Similarly, 40 % of scattering material was seen to be in particles larger than 1 µm. Altogether, this dataset provides information on size dependent aerosol composition that can be applied in evaluating how well large-scale aerosol models reproduce aerosol composition, especially with respect to scavenging in stratus clouds.
Observations on aerosol optical properties and scavenging during cloud events
