1,2,1,2,3,3,4,5,5,6,10,11,6,7,8,9,1,3- 1Institute of Chemical Engineering Sciences, Foundation for Research and Technology (FORTH/ICE-HT), Patras, Greece
- 2Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Patras, Greece
- 3Laboratory of Atmospheric Processes and their Impacts, School of Architecture, Civil & Environmental Engineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
- 4Environmental Radioactivity & Aerosol Technology for Atmospheric & Climate Impacts, National Centre of Scientific Research “Demokritos”, Ag. Paraskevi, Greece
- 5Department of Chemistry, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
- 6Department of Environmental Systems Science, Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETHZurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- 7Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research (IDAEA-CSIC), Barcelona, Spain
- 8ICREA, Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, Barcelona, Spain
- 9Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain
- 10School of Energy and Power Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China
- 11Shenyuan Honours College of Beihang University, Beihang University, Beijing, China
Ice nucleating particles (INPs) are a minor subset of atmospheric aerosols that can influence clouds, precipitation and climate by promoting the formation of ice at warm temperatures. Mineral dust is a dominant source of INPs in the atmosphere because of its relatively high ice nucleating efficiency and abundance. Despite its importance, there are considerable uncertainties about the impacts of atmospheric processing (chemical "aging") on the INP activity of dust - especially on the role of species that acidify (like sulfuric acid and nitric acid) upon condensation onto INPs.
Motivated by the above uncertainties, we carry out the CleanCloud PIANO campaigns - which involve laboratory studies of the INP activity of dust generated from soils originating from Iceland, Morocco, and Chile. We study the properties of freshly generated dust, as well as dust that has been exposed to acidic species (HNO3 and H2SO4) using the FORTH/ICEHT environmental chamber facility in Patras, Greece. Dust was generated two ways - using a cyclone generator in the case of fresh dust, or mixed with sea salt using the AEGOR sea spray simulation chamber.
INP activity was measured online with a Portable Ice Nucleation Experiment (PINE) and offline using a cold-plate droplet freezing assay on dust samples collected from the chamber using an impinger. Size-resolved INP was also characterized using an Aerodynamic Aerosol Classifier (AAC) to select dust particles below a defined size cut prior to entering the PINE instrument.
Our results show that aging by acidification can strongly suppress the ice nucleation efficiency of mineral dust. In particular, aging reduced mass-normalized INP concentrations by a median of 86.3% for Icelandic dust, 77.2% for Moroccan dust, and 84.7% for Chilean dust across the investigated temperature range, demonstrating that chemical processing during atmospheric transport can substantially weaken the ability of desert dust particles to act as INPs.
How to cite: Mitsios, C., Molina, C., Theodoropoulos, G., Foskinis, R., Zhang, J., Gkretsi, S., Gini, M. I., Eleftheriadis, K., Horchler, E. J., Bilde, M., Krautwig, T., Gao, K., Kanji, Z. A., Querol, X., Pérez, C., Pandis, S. N., and Nenes, A.: Ice nucleation ability of different desert dusts during PIANO chamber campaigns, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-17610, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-17610, 2026.
