Understanding aerosol microphysical properties from 10 years of data collected at Cabo Verde based on an unsupervised machine learning classification

Abstract

The Cape Verde Atmospheric Observatory (CVAO), which is influenced by both marine and desert dust air masses, has been used for long-term measurements of different properties of the atmospheric aerosol from 2008 to 2017. These properties include particle number size distributions (PNSD), light-absorbing carbon (LAC) and concentrations of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) together with their hygroscopicity. Here we summarize the results obtained for these properties and use an unsupervised machine learning algorithm for the classification of aerosol types. Five types of aerosols, i.e., marine, freshly formed, mixture, moderate dust and heavy dust, were classified. Air masses during marine periods are from the Atlantic Ocean and during dust periods are from the Sahara Desert. Heavy dust was more frequently present during wintertime, whereas the clean marine periods were more frequently present during springtime. It was observed that during the dust periods CCN number concentrations at a supersaturation of 0.30 % were roughly 2.5 times higher than during marine periods, but the hygroscopicity (κ) of particles in the size range from ∼ 30 to ∼ 175 nm during marine and dust periods were comparable. The long-term data presented here, together with the aerosol classification, can be used as a basis to improve our understanding of annual cycles of the atmospheric aerosol in the eastern tropical Atlantic Ocean and on aerosol-cloud interactions and it can be used as a basis for driving, evaluating and constraining atmospheric model simulations.