Abundance, Properties and Seasonal Variation of Bioaerosol Particles Observed during the SAIL Campaign

ABU SAYEED MD SHAWON, Katherine Benedict, Allison Aiken, Los Alamos National Laboratory

     Abstract Number: 108
     Working Group: Bioaerosols

Abstract
Bioaerosol particles such as pollen, fungal-spores, and bacteria are globally ubiquitous. They impact our climate, ecosystem, and human health, and yet they are largely uncharacterized in real-time in the atmosphere. Bioaerosol can impact cloud formation and radiative impacts by acting as ice nuclei or cloud condensation nuclei. They can also affect ecosystems or human health through aerial dispersion and transport. Though these impacts are well known, there is still a gap in understanding their abundance, properties and interactions for different meteorologies and ecosystems, especially due to the lack of long-term online ambient data.

We deployed a Wideband Integrated Bioaerosol Sensor (WIBS-Neo, DMT) at Crested Butte Mountain to the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) campaign. The WIBS is a single particle measurement system that facilitates two fluorescence lamps and complementary detectors to identify biogenic particles and specify their properties with high temporal resolution. As a U.S. DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) campaign, SAIL is focused on atmospheric and land-atmosphere processes and their impacts on the mountain hydrology of the East River Watershed in Colorado. During this campaign, our focus was to understand the abundance and properties of bioaerosol in a high-elevation (~9500 ft) mountainous terrain, and how these properties vary with meteorological conditions, aerosol sources and seasonal variations. We present the physical properties of different types of bioaerosol particles sampled from June 15 to September 13, 2022, and from March 22 to June 15, 2023 using WIBS, and compare our data with collocated measurements from the ARM Aerosol Observation System (AOS). In this presentation, we will discuss how the abundance, types, and diurnal cycle of bioaerosol varies during the Spring and Summer, and how different regional events may affect these properties. To our knowledge, these are the first high time resolution measurements of bioaerosol made within mountainous terrain.