Simulations of New Particle Formation and Growth Processes at Eastern Mediterranean, with the MALTE-Box Model

Formation and growth of atmospheric nanoparticles in the eastern Mediterranean: results from long-term measurements and process simulations

“…Using the non-event week as our control case, we performed simulations of number size distributions at Finokalia station using the subtropical setup and compared it to our measurements. For the "non-event week", weak NPF were predicted by the model during the last 2 days that were not found in the measurements (Tzitzikalaki et al, 2017) but appear to be associated with the rapid drop in CS during day 5 of the simulations. Nevertheless, even if no NPF took place during the last 2 days, it was apparent in our measurements that some nucleation particles appeared (∼ 200 cm −3 ), and thus the general tendency was captured by the model.…”

“…During the event week the simulated formation of new particles successfully coincided with the observations. The NPF events simulated using the nucleation rates as parameterized for the boreal environment overestimated the observations, while the simulated growth of newly formed particles was greatly underestimated as shown in Tzitzikalaki et al (2017). The most likely reason for this is the very low concentration of monoterpenes, calculated by the TM4-ECPL global model for the Finokalia model grid box, on which the ELVOC and SVOC chemistry was built.…”

“…For the present study, chemical reactions relevant to the production of condensing species from the Master Chemical Mechanism (MCM) were incorporated in the MALTE-Box chemical mechanism, as described in Boy et al (2013). These include the full MCM degradation scheme of the following volatitle organic compounds (described in more detail in Tzitzikalaki et al, 2017): C 1 -C 4 alkanes, C 2 -C 3 alkenes, acetylene, isoprene, αand β-pinene, aromatics, methanol, dimethyl sulfide, formaldehyde, formic and acetic acids, acetaldehyde, glycoaldehyde, glyoxal, methylglyoxal, acetone, hydroxyacetone, butanone, and marine amines. The Kinetic PreProcessor (KPP) was used to produce the Fortran code for the calculations of the concentrations of each individual compound (Damian et al, 2002), except for those species whose concentrations were manually input from large-scale model simulations.…”