The western Mediterranean basin as an aged aerosols reservoir. Insights from an old-fashioned but efficient radiotracer

Processes controlling the seasonal variations in <sup>210</sup>Pb and <sup>7</sup>Be at the Mt. Cimone WMO-GAW global station, Italy: a model analysis

“…Cimone: observations vs. model simulations The seasonality and frequency distributions of 210 Pb and 7 Be concentrations measured at the Mt. Cimone station were previously examined by Lee et al (2007), while more recent analyses of the 12-year record were presented in Tositti et al (2014) and Brattich et al (2016). Generally, both radionuclides show a marked seasonal maximum in the summertime, a behavior shared by PM 10 (Tositti et al, 2013) and O 3 (Bonasoni et al, 2000b).…”

Influence of stratospheric air masses on radiotracers and ozone over the central Mediterranean

“…However, potential errors in the individual trajectories are averaged out when considering a large number of back trajectories over a long-time period. In addition, our results are further limited from the coarse resolution of the meteorological database used in the back trajectory calculation over a region having a complex topography, similar to the previous work of [Brattich et al, 2017] at the same sampling site. In fact, Mt.…”

“…The difference in 210 Pb and PM 10 source regions at Mt. Cimone was already analyzed and described in detail by Brattich et al [], where it was attributed to the fact that African dust outbreaks contribute more to increases in the coarse‐sized than in fine‐sized particles, and therefore more to PM 10 than to 210 Pb. However, pointing out the strong resemblance between 7 Be and PM 10 source regions during the warm period, this new analysis suggests the influence of other effects and particularly the presence of strong 7 Be‐rich vertical downdrafts from the upper troposphere transporting 7 Be particles (and not 210 Pb) during some Saharan dust transports at this site.…”

“…North America and Atlantic regions correspond to areas where the polar-front and/or subtropical jet streams are generally stronger, often recognized as STE promoting mechanisms [e.g., Trickl et al, 2010;Škerlak et al, 2014;Lin et al, 2015]. Additionally, Figure 1 shows that northwestern Africa and the western Mediterranean are source regions of high 7 Be while they are not highlighted in the 7 Be/ 210 Pb map, thus indicating that they are to some degree concurrent sources of high 210 Pb [see also Brattich et al, 2016]. All these areas will be compared to high potential vorticity regions afterwards in this work.…”

“…More recently, Cristofanelli et al [] used FLEXPART (“FLEXible PARTicle”) dispersion model for investigating O 3 , CO, and black carbon and inverse modeling was applied to investigate source regions of greenhouse gases and halogenated gases at the CMN site [e.g., Giostra et al , ; Maione et al , , ]. The potential source contribution function (PSCF) of Ashbaugh et al [] was used to assess the source regions of particulate matter 10 (PM 10 ) [ Tositti et al , ] and to compare 210 Pb source regions at CMN with those at the coastal station of El Arenosillo in SW Spain [ Brattich et al , ]. None of these methods has been applied to SI‐related components measured at CMN.…”