The relations between the aerosol optical thickness AOT(500) and the Ångström exponent α(440, 870)

for spring, selleck chemicals llc summer and autumn are shown in Figure 5. This visual representation often allows one to define physically interpretable cluster regions for different types of aerosols with different optical properties ( El-Metwally et al. 2008). Figure 5 shows that the cases of exceptionally high aerosol load (AOT(500) > 0.500) observed in summer and autumn 2002 are typically associated with a high Ångström exponent (> 1.4). Moreover, α(440, 870) is then almost independent of AOT(500). This rules out the possible impact of thin clouds on aerosol optical thickness in such cases. The Ångström exponent is within the range typical of biomass burning and urban-industrial

aerosols ( Dubovik et al. 2002), which confirms the advective origin of the aerosol in these cases. The dependence of aerosol optical properties over the Baltic region on air mass movements was observed by previous researchers. For example, Smirnov et al. (1995) measured aerosol optical thickness Etoposide purchase AOT(550) of 0.46 and 0.09 and an Ångström exponent of 1.14 and 0.99 for cases of continental Polar and maritime Arctic types of air mass over the Baltic Sea, respectively. For modified maritime Polar air reaching the Baltic region after passing the British Isles and Scandinavia, AOT(550) and α(460, 1016) were respectively equal to 0.45 and 1.37. The next step in this work was to examine the influence of wind direction and wind speed on the optical properties of Baltic

aerosols, i.e. AOT(500) and α(440, 870). For this, we used the wind directions measured at the Fårosund meteorological station. In order to determine the influence of meteorological factors on the aerosol optical properties the dataset for aerosol optical thickness was divided with respect to wind direction into northerly (315°–45°), easterly (45°–135°), southerly (135°–225°) and westerly (225°–315°) clonidine wind sectors. Aerosol emissions from the surface of the Baltic Sea depend on wind speed. For wind speeds < 6 m s−1 an increase in aerosol particle concentration due to increasing wind speed is usually connected with biological and chemical processes occurring at sea. For wind speeds Vw > 6 m s−1 dynamic processes, such as breaking waves, begin to dominate aerosol generation from the sea surface ( Zieliński 2006). There are only a small number of data with high wind speeds in the Gotland dataset from which the crucial generation of seaborne aerosol occurs, i.e. Vw ≥ 10 m s−1 ( Petelski 2003). The dataset with Vw ≤ 6 m s−1 constituted 66%, 58% and 55% of all the data in spring, summer and autumn respectively. The number of observations, divided into season and wind direction, is shown in Table 3. An example of the seasonal dependence of aerosol optical thickness for λ = 500 nm on wind velocity is shown in Figure 6 for westerly winds in summer.