Development of a fetch dependent sea-spray source function using aerosol concentration measurements in the North-Western Mediterranean.

Abstract The aim of this paper is to determine an accurate formulation for the sea-spray source function characteristic for the North-Western Mediterranean. To this end, the MACMod aerosol transport model was implemented in the study area using different sea-state dependent flux formulations. The simulations were compared to a large data set of aerosol size distributions acquired over the last ten years in the study area, yielding the evolution of the sea-spray concentrations with increasing fetch and hence, with the development of the wave field. This allowed for an improvement of the Demoisson et al. (2013) sea-spray source function (S3F) for the Mediterranean. The new formulation extends its validity to shorter fetch and larger radii and turned out to be most suitable for predicting the atmospheric concentrations of sea-spray aerosols in this region. Highlights • This paper deals with the study of the sea-spray contribution to the atmospheric aerosol in the North-Western Mediterranean. • The objective is the determination of an accurate sea-spray-source function in the 0.5–20 μm size range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]