AAAR 31st Annual Conference
October 8-12, 2012
Hyatt Regency Minneapolis
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
SOA Formation from Glyoxal in the Aerosol Aqueous Phase: A Case Study From Mexico City Using an Explicit Laboratory-based Model
ELEANOR WAXMAN, Barbara Ervens, Katja Dzepina, Julia Lee-Taylor, Rainer Volkamer, University of Colorado
Abstract Number: 529 Working Group: Aerosol Chemistry
Abstract Glyoxal is an important contributor to secondary organic aerosol (SOA) formation via aerosol aqueous phase processing. This work takes a glyoxal-SOA model parameterization based on laboratory data and combines it with ambient measurements in a box model. This is applied to the Mexico City Metropolitan Area case study on April 9, 2003 to determine if aerosol uptake and processing of glyoxal in aerosol water can explain the previously observed gas phase glyoxal imbalance. We find that we can explain the imbalance and that the time series of the glyoxal-SOA formation from our model suggests that a surface uptake process is occurring in Mexico City. We compare the AMS-measured OOA to SOA predictions using our glyoxal model combined with background aerosol, traditional aerosol, and either Robinson, Grieshop, or GECKO-A S/IVOC aerosol parameterization mass. Additionally, we compare the AMS-measured O/C ratios with O/C calculated from our glyoxal model combined with background aerosol, traditional aerosol, and either Robinson, Grieshop, or GECKO-A S/IVOC parameterization. We find that our glyoxal model is necessary to bring the O/C ratios in line with those measured in Mexico City. Finally, we explore the effect O/C has on likely particle growth for the Mexico City aerosol.