Improved technique for measuring the size distribution of black carbon particles in rainwater and snow samples

Black carbon (BC) is the strongest contributor to sunlight absorption among atmospheric aerosols. Quantitative understanding of wet deposition of BC, which strongly affects the spatial distribution of BC, is important to improve our understandings on climate change. We have devised a technique for measuring the masses of individual BC particles in rainwater and snow samples, as a combination of a nebulizer and a single-particle soot photometer (SP2) (Ohata et al. 2011, 2013; Schwarz et al. 2012; Mori et al. 2014). We show two important improvements in this technique: 1)We have extended the upper limit of detectable BC particle diameter from 0.9 μm to about 4.0 μm by modifying the photodetector for measuring the laser-induced incandescence signal. 2)We introduced a pneumatic nebulizer Marin-5 (Cetac Technologies Inc., Omaha, NE, USA) and experimentally confirmed its high extraction efficiency (~50%) independent of particle diameter up to 2.0 μm. Using our improved system, we simultaneously measured the size distribution of BC particles in air and rainwater in Tokyo. We observed that the size distribution of BC in rainwater was larger than that in air, indicating that large BC particles were effectively removed by precipitation. We also observed BC particles with diameters larger than 1.0 μm, indicating that further studies of wet deposition of BC will require the use of the modified SP2.