Aerosol yields and losses of aldehydes and amines from evaporating cloud droplets

In evaporating aqueous droplets, the alpha-dicarbonyl compounds glyoxal and methylglyoxal can form oligomers and partly avoid loss to the gas phase. In clouds and aerosol, amines and ammonium salts react with volatile dicarbonyls to form semi-volatile imines, imidazoles and light-absorbing oligomer compounds. Particle size measurements during droplet evaporation experiments (both polydisperse and monodisperse) show that the fast production of semivolatile products is significant. Reactions of volatile methylamine with dicarbonyl compounds increase the resulting dry aerosol volumes, but do not change the fraction of dicarbonyls lost to the gas phase. Low volatility amines and ammonium sulfate, on the other hand, have reduced dry aerosol volumes in the presence of dicarbonyl compounds. The formation of semi-volatile products in these cases causes a net loss of aerosol material as non-volatile reactants are converted into semivolatile products. Thus, while these reactions provide a means for small aldehydes and amines to be converted into secondary organic aerosol (SOA), for low volatility amine and ammonia salts already in the condensed phase, these reactions do not significantly increase SOA mass. However, in both cases these reactions may be significant sources of “brown carbon,” light-absorbing compounds that increase the radiative forcing of clouds and aerosol.