Introduction

There are very few measurements against which to test global climate model predictions of total particulate organic and elemental carbon abundances and their vertical/spatial distribution. In part, this is due to the difficulty of making the measurements: The uncertainties and biases of current measurement techniques are poorly constrained [Huebert and Charlson, 2000; Lim et al., 2003; Chow et al., 2001]. Positive and negative sampling artifacts are common results of vapor adsorption and semivolatile compound evaporation during sampling. Analytical methods necessarily depend on operational definitions of OC and EC, which can produce results that relate poorly to the physical and optical properties of the carbonaceous material. Additional difficulties result from the peculiarities of airborne sampling, among which was our desire to keep sampling times to an hour or less to avoid averaging over multiple air masses and altitudes.

Measurements of organic and elemental carbon in Asian outflow during ACE-Asia from the NSF/NCAR C-130 [.pdf, 903.6Kb]