2015 AAAR Conference Symposium Sponsorship: "The Role of Water in Aerosol Chemistry"

The purpose of this funding is to support, in part, travel, lodging, and registration expenses for invited symposium speakers, and travel and lodging expenses allowing students to attend and make presentations at a special conference symposium that focuses on topics of interest to the U.S. DOE Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program.

Water, the main condensed-phase component of the atmosphere, plays a central role in aerosol chemistry. Aerosol water and cloud droplets provide bulk media and unique conditions (e.g., low pH) for uptake and chemical processing of soluble, reactive gases (e.g. SO2, N2O5, SOA precursors). Adsorbed layers of water may impact aerosol surface reactions, and absorbed water can influence the formation of highly viscous phases, which in turn have an impact on aerosol chemical processing. This symposium will highlight studies of aerosol chemistry involving water, from field, modeling, and laboratory perspectives, from the molecular to the regional and global levels.

The topic of this proposal is of direct interest to the DOE Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program. ASR seeks to advance the process-level understanding of the key interactions among aerosols, clouds, precipitation, radiation, dynamics, and thermodynamics, with the ultimate goal of reducing the uncertainty in global and regional climate models. The uptake of water by aerosols directly impacts the aerosol life cycle and cloud-aerosol-precipitation interactions, two of the primary research objectives of ASR.