Physical and Radiative Properties of Aerosol Particles across the Caribbean Basin: A Comparison between Clean and Perturbed African Dust and Volcanic Ash Air Masses

Aerosol’s optical and physical properties were measured during year 2007 at Cape San Juan, a ground-based station located at the northeastern tip of Puerto Rico. The three cases investigated were classified according to the origin of the air masses: clean (C), African dust (AD), and volcanic ash (VA). The instrumentation used included a sunphotometer to determine volume size distributions and aerosol optical thickness (AOT), a 3-wavelength nephelometer to determine the scattering coefficient (σsp), and a 3-wavelength particle/soot absorption photometer (PSAP) to measure the absorption coefficient (σap). The average volume size distributions were trimodal for the C (peaks at 0.14, 0.99 and 4.25 µm radius) and AD (peaks at 0.11, 1.30 and 2.00 µm radius) cases and bimodal for the VA (peaks at 0.19 and 2.75 µm radius) case. Fine and coarse modes maxima for AD occurred at radii smaller than for VA, confirming the different origins of those particles. The average values for the total σsp were higher for AD (82.9 Mm-1) and VA (33.7 Mm-1) compared to C (16.6 Mm-1). The same happened for the AOT maximum values at 500 nm with 0.92, 0.30, and 0.06 for AD, VA, and C, respectively. The observed increase in the values of the Angstrom exponent (å) is indicative of a decrease in the size of the particles associated to VA (å= 0.27) and AD (å =0.89) when compared to C (å =0.24). The volume size distributions and thus the mass were dominated by the coarse mode (> 1.0 µm) especially for the AD case. Results have shown that AD as well as VA has a significant impact on the physical and radiative properties across Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Additional results on the AOT wavelength dependence and on the annual variability of the properties under study will be presented.