ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF PHYSICAL AND CHEMICAL PARTICLE PROPERTIES IN THE ATMOSPHERIC AEROSOL

Consideration of sources and growth dynamics of aerosols has led to the conclusion that there may be a distribution or variation of chemical composition and physical structure among atmospheric aerosol particles as a function of size, and within a narrow size range as well. A mathematical representation of these particle properties in terms of an additional dimension to the number size distribution is described. Examples of the relevance of this aspect of aerosol characterization for physical and chemical processes in the atmosphere are discussed. A review of the available techniques shows that several methods are available which can and have provided quantitative results on the distribution of particle properties. Examples of data from the literature have been selected and are presented as three-dimensional distributions illustrating the wide range of particle properties which may exist in narrow size intervals. An evaluation of these results reiterates the value of taking the distribution of particle properties in the atmosphere into account for sampling and modeling purposes. © 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers.