References

ACPD

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions

ACPD

1680-7375

Copernicus GmbH

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/acpd-8-20661-2008

Analysis of atmospheric neutral and charged molecular clusters in boreal forest using pulse-height CPC

Lehtipalo

¹ Sipilä

¹ ² Riipinen

¹ Nieminen

¹ Kulmala

Department of Physical Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland

also at: Helsinki Institute of Physics, Helsinki, Finland

10 12 2008

8 6 20661 20685

This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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We measured the size distribution of atmospheric neutral and charged clusters and particles down to mobility diameter around 1.5 nm by applying pulse-height CPC technique at SMEAR II station in Hyytiälä, southern Finland during spring 2007 and May 2008. The concentration of molecular clusters smaller than 3 nm seems to be highly variable in boreal forest environment. The concentration varied typically between 500–50 000 cm−3, the medians being 8060 cm−3 in year 2007 and 3380 cm−3 in 2008. By comparing to concentrations measured with ion spectrometers, we conclude that ion clusters and neutral clusters produced by ion-ion recombination are usually not sufficient to explain all of the observed clusters; the median fraction of recombination products from all neutral clusters was 4.9%. Before and during most new particle formation events the cluster formation rate rose only slightly, or remained close to stable. Nocturnal formation of clusters was also frequently observed.

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