Asian Aerosols in North America: Extent and Frequency of Anthropogenic Pollutants

Both natural and anthropogenic aerosols nave been detected in transport across the northern Pacific Ocean. These aerosols play important roles in both climatic and geochemical processes across the North Pacific and temperate and arctic North America. Understanding the anthropogenic component of these aerosols permits separation of natural and anthropogenic effects at hemispheric scales. Using soil linked to Asian deserts as a marker for Asian air masses, we identified a set of several hundred transpacific transport events captured in aerosol samplers operated by the IMPROVE network. Using statistical methods, we then identified a suite of combustion-derived aerosol components associated with Asian transport. From these data, we developed statistics on the distribution of Asian pollutants in North America over the decade of the 1990s.