Breakout Summary Report

ARM/ASR User and PI Meeting

10 - 13 June 2019

Breakout Description

The guiding philosophy for cooperative science in the secondary organic aerosol (SOA) group, both for incorporating knowledge into models and identifying new and important emerging topics for study, is to focus on SOA formation and aging processes that are missing in aerosol climate models and have large potential implications on clouds and radiative forcing.

The goals of the session are: to share and discuss the latest results from ASR/ARM-funded SOA research including laboratory, field, and modeling efforts and to plan for future collaborative efforts and emphases.

Main Discussion

The session consisted of eight talks by principal investigators (PIs) who contributed three-four slides about their research progress. Much of the discussion centered around the talks and was related to the science that was presented in them. After the PI presentations and the discussion about those presentations, we discussed community needs. A general desire remains for a community modeling resource that would serve as a kind of testbed that experimentalists could use to test out new discoveries to get a preliminary estimate of the impact. The idea is that this community model would be used for ideas that weren’t yet ready to be implemented in a global model or still were in a somewhat early stage of development. There was not a solid consensus on whether this would be a box model or a regional model. There has been some ad hoc progress at making this happen with a few PIs working with modelers to test ideas, but so far no single, community resource. The main barrier is in making a model that is robust and flexible enough to handle the somewhat varied needs and desires of the community.

In terms of ARM measurements, there was general agreement that the community would benefit from having a full set of size distribution measurements across the entire size range (few nm up to 10 um) at the ARM fixed and mobile sites. The community also expressed interest in having gas-phase chemical composition measurements during the IOPs. There is a recognition that continuously operating the PTR-MS at the sites may be beyond ARM’s scope, but there was a suggestion that the PTR-MS could be run during IOPs, perhaps in partnership with a guest operator.

Needs

• Community model for testing new finding that may not yet warrant inclusion in larger-scale models.


• Size distribution measurements across a wide size range at fixed and mobile sites.


• Gas-phase chemical composition measurements of VOCs during IOPs. This could perhaps be accomplished by a guest operator running the ARM PTR-MS.