Coarse mode aerosol particle size distribution collected in the Southern Ocean in the austral summer of 2016/2017, during the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition.

Dataset abstract

The authors would highly appreciate to be contacted if the data is used for any purpose.

We measured coarse mode aerosol particle size distributions with an aerodynamic particle sizer (APS, model TSI 3321) at a time resolution of five minutes during the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (ACE). The diameter range is 0.7 to 19 µm. Particles in this size range are indicative of primary sea spray aerosol, biological particles and potentially long-range transported mineral dust. These particles are also important for cloud formation as they act as cloud condensation nuclei or ice nucleating particles, the latter especially in the case of biological particles and mineral dust.

Typically the instrument reports data starting from particles with a diameter greater than 500 nm, however, particle number concentrations in the channels below 723 nm were overestimated, which is a common artefact with this instrument.

The data have been cleaned from the influence of the exhaust of the research vessel. Temporal coverage is from December 20, 2016 to April 10, 2017. We give five-minute averaged data as dN/dlog(dp), where dN is the particle number concentration per measured size bin normalized over the logarithm of the bin width. The bin width is defined as the distance between two diameters. They are spaced equally in log-space with dlog(dp) = log(d_n+1/d_n) = 1/32. To derive the total particle number concentration one has to integrate over the diameter range taking into account the normalization by dlog(dp).

Dataset contents

• ACESPACE_coarse_mode_aerosol_particle_size_distribution.csv, data file, comma-separated values
• data_file_header.txt, metadata, text
• README.md, metadata, text

NaN values in a complete row denote missing values because of e.g., ship exhaust contamination, maintenance, instrument failure. NaN values which appear individually or only in small groups reflect that data were below detection limit. For latitude and longitude, NaN values are noted in cases where position data was not available for the given time period.

Dataset license

This coarse mode aerosol particle size distribution dataset collected during ACE is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) whose full text can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/